IDH is proud to release our 2022 Annual Report detailing our work towards driving meaningful impact at scale in a year of challenging social, environmental and political contexts.
IDH aims to put people, planet, and progress at the heart of markets by leveraging the power of global trade to create better jobs, better incomes, a better environment, and gender equality for all. In 2022 we continued our work towards changing the conditions of the current market system that contribute to poverty, inequality and environmental degradation through conscious interventions and collaborations that help enable impact at scale.
Throughout the year we collaborated with 798 partners worldwide operating in 55 countries, including 392 private sector partners in Europe. Together we implemented 177 projects and programs across more than 15 sectors, raising €42.7m private investment co-funding in sustainable business practices and field level innovations.
Whether improving wages through public-private partnerships and tools, tracking and reducing deforestation with local governments, or giving farmers better access to finance, our inclusive programs in 2022 strove to leverage the power of markets to create sustainable solutions for the public good.
In a divided world, we are all invited to contribute to the work of restoring trust in our systems, in our ability to push for change that benefits the majority.
Daan Wensing, CEO of IDH
Ensuring equitable wages and conditions for Better Jobs
There is consistent evidence that wage inequality negatively impacts economic growth, however current economic systems are still unable to provide many workers with a decent living. Additionally, many employees work in dangerous or unhealthy conditions, threatening both their own welfare and the long-term stability of businesses.
In 2022 IDH worked towards creating better jobs by convening for improved safety conditions in factories in the textile and manufacturing industry, generating job opportunities through regional value chain development, and helping combat gender-based violence against women workers in agriculture. Some highlights from these collaborations included 77% of safety issues being remediated in textile factories in Vietnam and India, 105,093 new job opportunities created in Ghanian grain, and 60,000 tea workers being reached through women’s safety workshops in India.
Over 300 stakeholders attended the second IDH Living Wage Summit with the support of the Belgian Development Cooperation, focusing on how to accelerate and scale action to close the gap on living wages. The event included the launch of the Living Wage Action Guide which supports the IDH Roadmap on Roadmap on Living Wages to allow companies to explore interventions.
2022 also saw the expansion of retail commitments to living wages in the banana and tea sectors, demonstrating how these coalitions are gaining the momentum needed to drive large-scale adoption and bring living wages in commodities from niche to norm.
Redressing value chain inequity for Better Incomes
The majority of smallholder farming households that produce the world’s food and other agricommodities live in chronic poverty. In 2022, IDH and partners worked towards closing the income gap for smallholder farmers through numerous interventions, including convening collective action to raise farmgate prices in the cocoa industry, promoting regional value chains to develop local sourcing, and improving resilience to climate change through regenerative agriculture. In 2022, our collaborations resulted in 716k farming households with an increased net income (136k of which were female), 104.3k farmers gaining improved access to finance (36.2k female), and 852.6k farmers gaining access to inputs and technology (206.9k female).
140 relevant stakeholders were brought to the table at the 2022 edition of the Living Income Summit to accelerate action on closing the living income gap. The summit illustrates IDH’s conviction that every actor in the value chain has a role to play in ensuring a more equitable distribution of value and risk, through individual action and joint collaboration. Through an inclusive agribusiness approach, the IDH Farmfit fund helped smallholder farmers and SMEs in India diary and Zambian agricultural services to improve their business model and gain access to finance, raising their ability to earn higher incomes.
Forming coalitions for a Better Environment
The extreme weather events of 2022 underlined the urgent need for sustainable alternatives to current market and agricultural systems. IDH worked towards a better environment by collaborating with partners to help farmers transition to climate-resilient practices and protect and restore forests and natural ecosystems. In the last year, 395k hectares of soil were effectively under restoration and rehabilitation, and 4,230 household/production facilities gained improved water availability & access.
We contributed to the development of regenerative, low-carbon and deforestation-free landscapes by helping facilitate Production, Protection and Inclusion (PPI) compacts between stakeholders in tropical sourcing areas, and worked towards reducing the impacts of value chains on ecosystems by promoting chemical waste reduction and the use of pesticides, as well as finding ways to link global markets to sustainable sourcing.
In 2022, the new value chain sustainability solution SourceUp was used by major buyers to source coffee in the Vietnamese Central Highlands, as part of their commitment towards 100% responsibly sourced coffee by 2025. Developed by IDH and its partners, SourceUp is an online platform that links agricommodity companies with PPI compacts in producing regions.
Embedding Gender Equality
Lastly, but equally important, we made progress in our commitment to embedding a gender-transformative approach across the organization and putting gender equality front of mind in everything we do. Internally, we changed our processes so that every funding opportunity that goes before our investment committee must have a gender intentional approach. On a program level, we conducted training and workshops for gender champions, and put in place mechanisms to help combat gender-based violence and empower gender transformative business models across sectors.
There is much more to do in our ambitious goal of transforming the current market system for the public good – but the direction of travel is clear and unwavering.
Read the complete 2022 IDH Annual Report
Along with an exploration of our impact themes – Better Jobs, Better Incomes, Better Environment, and Gender – our 2022 Annual Report provides in-depth examples of how we put market transformation into action through collaboration.