Value Chains

Value
Chains

Subscribe to Value
Chains blog feed

Value Chains

Beyond Fair Trade: Portland roaster and coffee farmers make a family

At a time when fair trade certification was a hallmark of the coffee industry, Nossa Familia Coffee established a different model. To learn more about how the small company is fair without ‘fair trade,’ Global Envision visited the family's Portland, Ore., roastery.

Value Chains

Reflections from Davos: Mercy Corps CEO to private sector

Mercy Corps' CEO reflects on partnerships—foundations and companies whose portfolios span emerging markets, fragile states and hard-to-reach places: "We’re facing significant obstacles together, and our strategic partnerships are shifting the way solutions to complex social problems will be designed in years to come."

Value Chains

Profiting from poop: How selling human waste could revolutionize sanitation

Dealing with human waste has become a health crisis in many poor communities, but residents of a Kenyan slum have found a solution that turns poop into profit.

Social Enterprise

Krochet Kids International reimagines empowerment with hook and stitch

A team of friends from Spokane is turning a love of crocheting into real jobs for women in Uganda and Peru.

Social Enterprise

Farm business advisors deliver products and profits to Cambodia’s rural farmers

Lors Thmey, which means ‘new growth’ in Khmer, sells a bundled package to Cambodian farmers that provides farming necessities and technical know-how through a business model designed to boost incomes, share knowledge and create value at each step of the supply chain.

Value Chains

The curse on gum arabic in Sudan

Gum arabic is a little ingredient with a big footprint in food and medicine around the world. Despite high demand, its producers face an incredible spread of challenges.

Value Chains

Growing KFC: When exploiting markets may exploit farmers

Kentucky Fried Chicken is expanding in Africa and local farmers could benefit. But the aid organizations connecting farmers to the company may actually be setting them up for disaster.

Value Chains

Pomegranates vs Poppies: Building food markets to fight the drug trade

The crops used to produce most of the world's illegal drugs come from a small number of weak states. Can providing impoverished farmers there with alternative crops -- and the markets to sell them in -- undermine the drug trade?

Value Chains

Quotable: Bill Gates debunks 3 myths about the world's poor

Bill and Melinda Gates believe that by 2035 there will be almost no poor countries. This year they warn that pessimistic viewpoints may harm the world's chances.

Value Chains

Is farming rice differently the key to ending hunger? India tries it

While the government lays out a plan to stockpile and distribute subsidized grains to feed the hungry, a new way of planting and farming rice across India has proven dramatic success.