Our centres around four key pillars
Farmer Livelihoods
We aim to to improve the standard of living for smallholder farmers in ETG’s supply chain. Key to this pillar is the concept of a Living Income, that is, the net annual income required by a household for everyone in that household to achieve a decent living standard.
Community Development
In addition to supporting individual farmers, we committed to supporting the development of resilient local communities. This involves working closely with local NGOs, governments, farmer cooperatives, and Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) in order to provide the kind of support which can best serve the communities with whom we work.
Protecting Nature
ETG | Beyond Beans is committed to improving environmental conditions in all our work. Through our supply chain risk assessment and monitoring, we are improving tracking our GHG performance to contribute to achieving Sustainable Development Goals around water, sanitation, life on the land, and the environment.
You can read more about how ETG | Beyond Beans works to Protect Nature Nature here.
Innovation
Technological innovations have opened new avenues for community and environmental development. We understand the importance of capitalising on these developments and have made technology. This is especially true smart phone applications which are low-cost, impactful, and so low-powered that they are useful even in rural communities which only have intermittent access to electricity.
Data Collection
Collecting data allows us to measure our impact, monitor progress and to ensure maximum traceability.
We collect data from each and every one of our farmers using smartphone technology. During farm visits, our field supervisors can input data offline and later upload it to a secured cloud. We are working towards generating a full digital registry of farmer and plantation profiles.
In addition to ongoing data collection, we conduct baseline research on sustainability topics from farmer incomes to effective farming practices.
GPS Mapping: Making polygon maps of each of the farms in our supply chains allows us to ensure that our cocoa is 100% traceable.
Farmer Profiles: Collecting profiles of our farmers in a digital farmer registry allows us to track the impact of interventions across all the farmers we support, along with information on demographics.
CLMT Integration: Integrating our child labour monitoring tool into our digital registry is making it possible to track the impact of this tool across farmers and view trends.