Living Income Community of Practice
ISEAL, COSA, and the Sustainable Food Lab support efforts to ensure consistency and alignment of indicators to measure the short, medium, and long term outcomes of agriculture systems. This collaboration is one component of a broader effort for transparency, consensus building, and mutual learning among the three organizations and the networks they represent. We see this work responding to the needs supply chain actors have expressed: to communicate supplier conditions effectively, to be valued partners in addressing challenges, and to have assurance that trade has a positive social impact and supports progress toward sustainable farming.
During our June 2016 meeting on living income, the community of practice on living income expressed interest in working towards common metrics and guidance related
to farm economics. COSA, SFL and ISEAL had already started a process to align its various metric protocols and guidances. Driven by the interest of this community, we focused on a few metrics related to farm economics in order to contribute to a larger dialogue on metrics, resulting in Measuring Smallholder Incomes: Towards better alignment and reporting of farm economic metrics.
This is not a new set of metrics, but a mutual guidance document for gathering and reporting data on commonly accepted farm economic metrics. It is a living document, the first step in a journey towards alignment and better reporting of farm economic metrics. In that spirit, in the cover of the document we have included a link to a survey for anyone using this guidance to provide feedback and share experience. Read more about the Sustainable Food Lab, COSA, ISEAL collaboration here.
This guidance was also an input to GROW Africa’s Smallholder Working Group’s paper on measuring incomes, entitled “Measuring and evaluating socio-economic progress of smallholder farmers in formal agribusiness chains”.
Webinar Series on Living Income
In addition to developing the guidance SFL, ISEAL and COSA host a webinar series for continuing discussion on Living Income measurement. Click here to register for the webinar:
Malawi Tea 2020 & GIZ ‘Fast Track’ study on living and actual income
7th September 2017 – 3:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. BST
Join us for this webinar to learn more about a recent study on living income conducted by GIZ under the umbrella of the Malawi Tea 2020 partnership. This partnership brings together the organisations who can deliver the changes required to achieve a competitive and profitable Malawian tea industry where workers earn a living wage and smallholders earn a living income. GIZ will be presenting on a recent study they conducted to calculate actual incomes and a living income benchmark for smallholder tea farmers in Malawi using a ‘fast track’ method. For further information about the Malawi 2020 Tea Revitalisation programme, please visit http://www.ethicalteapartnership.org/project/malawi-2020-tea-revitalisation-programme/ and http://www.malawitea2020.com/ .
Living Income CoP launch event
On the 27th June, at the 2017 Global Sustainability Standards Conference in Zürich, we had a session to signify the official launch of the Living Income Community of Practice. Over 150 people attended the session hosted by an esteemed panel of Noura Hanna (Workers’ Rights and Livelihood expert, UTZ), Don Seville (Co- Director, Sustainable Food Lab) and Piera Waibel (Managing Director, Lindt Cocoa Foundation). Gerd Fleischer (Head, Agricultural Innovation and Sustainability Standards Section) and Marta Maireles (Manager, ISEAL) also highlighted the importance of working on living income and the Living Income CoP was promoted as a space for collaboration to advance on the topic. A big thank you to all of you who were able to attend!
Submit your studies and webinar content
If you are developing and/or have implemented methodologies for calculating living income benchmarks do get in touch with us. We would love to hear from you. We are also interested in learning about upcoming, ongoing and finalised studies that have gathered data on farm economics.
If you have any ideas for future community webinars please email Adam ([email protected]), Stephanie Daniels ([email protected]) or Marta Maireles ([email protected]) with any information or ideas.