Measuring Our Impact

By measuring our impact, we unlock critical data that drives real decision making about where and how we deploy limited resources.


Impact measurement and management is at the heart of Root Capital’s work to transform rural communities. We have a responsibility to ensure our work improves peoples’ livelihoods and doesn’t cause unintended harm. Impact measurement findings help us analyze our results and fine-tune our programs to better serve farming families. To contribute evidence to the broader sector, we regularly share what we’ve learned. Read our latest findings.

How We Measure Impact

Our impact measurement and management efforts focus on two areas:


We employ best-in-class standards from the impact investing sector and also situate our metrics within the broader
global development agenda. We employ rigorous evaluation methodologies; most recently, conducting our first set of quasi-experimental evaluations to measure our impact on farmer incomes. Learn more about this study.

We balance our commitment to rigor with usability—measuring impact in ways that are relevant to our work, budget-conscious, and suitable for remote, rural contexts. This ensures that the results are useful both to us and to our clients. In all cases, we make sure that the community directly benefits from our studies, through an approach we call "client-centric evaluation." As we measure impact, we also generate information that is useful to farmers and enterprises and deliver that data back to them.


Reports and Impact Studies


Women in Agriculture Initiative: 2014 Annual Report

Root Capital’s Women in Agriculture Initiative (WAI) seeks to promote greater economic opportunity for women by supporting small and growing businesses with access to credit and financial training and by promoting gender-inclusive practices. In 2014, we extended the reach of our financial products and services, increasing the number of gender-inclusive clients in Africa and Latin America.

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Improving Rural Livelihoods: A Study of Four Guatemalan Coffee Cooperatives

Drawing from findings from four individual studies of coffee cooperatives in Guatemala, this "cluster study" explores whether Root Capital’s financing and training enable our clients to increase their impacts—and if so, to what extent. Download Executive Summary

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Case Study: Tziscao

Tziscao aggregates and markets organic- and fair trade–certified coffee from 485 farmers in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. With this impact study, we seek to understand both the cooperative’s likely impacts on its members and of Root Capital’s impact on the cooperative, with regards to both farmer livelihoods and environmental performance.

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Case Study: COOMPROCOM

This case study evaluates how the Nicaraguan coffee cooperative COOMPROCOM supports farmer livelihoods. It assesses the impact of Root Capital lending on clients, and the impact of COOMPROCOM on the smallholder farmers they serve.

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Rapid Impact Evaluation: Fruiteq

Fruiteq is a private enterprise that sources Fair Trade- and organic-certified mangoes from 830 small-scale farmers in Burkina Faso, Mali and Ivory Coast. This is the first case study Root Capital has conducted in the fresh fruits and vegetables sector. It provides practical lessons on the appropriate loan structure and risks particular to the value chain.

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Rapid Impact Evaluation: COOPCAB

COOPCAB is a coffee cooperative in southeastern Haiti near the border with the Dominican Republic. In this study, we seek to understand and document the cooperative's various social and economic impacts and the effect Root Capital’s loans have had on COOPCAB’s operations.

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