Millions of smallholder farmers across Africa struggle to escape poverty. At the same time, food and beverage companies in the region can’t always source the agricultural products they need. Project Nurture– a partnership between the global nonprofit TechnoServe, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Coca-Cola Company–sought to address both these problems by integrating mango and passion fruit farmers in Kenya and Uganda into the local Coca-Cola supply chain. This met the company’s business objectives while providing a steady market and greater incomes for the farmers. In total, Project Nurture worked with 54,000 farmers (nearly a third of them women), training them to enhance the quality and quantity of their fruit, helping them strengthen or create over 1,000 farmer business groups and connecting them with other markets such as local processors, wholesalers and regional exporters. As a result, Coca-Cola was able to produce a locally-sourced fruit juice in East Africa for the first time, reducing time and costs over the long run– while farmers’ incomes more than doubled, increasing by an average of 142%.
