Three Things We’re Looking Forward to in 2024
1. More climate-positive solutions for farmers and business owners
In 2024, we’re looking forward to continuing our Regenerate 30 initiative to put farmers and business owners at the heart of solutions for climate change. Our work will create living incomes, cut emissions, and improve the protection, management, and restoration of landscapes.
TechnoServe will continue this movement in 2024 by expanding our regenerative business portfolio to include the development of regenerative value chains in coastal communities. In Nigeria, a new program will support private sector actors to create green jobs for women and youth by recycling 49,000 MT of plastics. In Chile, TechnoServe will pilot a sustainable seaweed project, building on our 2019 seaweed supply chain study. And in Kenya, we will build alternative livelihoods that diversify economies in coastal areas to avoid overfishing.
This year our regenerative work will also include partnering with Acorn to pilot carbon credit payments to coffee farmers in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru under our MOCCA Project, funded by USDA’s Food for Progress Program. We look forward to how this approach will reward farmers for their regenerative agroforestry practices, validating the business case before assessing pathways to scale this alternative revenue stream for coffee farmers.
2. Nutritious food for communities across Africa
This year, we will build upon our food systems transformation work, expanding our food processing approach into new countries, strengthening food systems at scale in Mozambique and Kenya, and supporting improved agriculture and aquaculture sectors in West Africa.
We will also continue our work with Millers for Nutrition, an initiative that began toward the end of 2023. Millers for Nutrition is a coalition to make adequate fortification of staple foods easier and more rewarding for millers, which are the businesses responsible for processing dietary staples like flour, cooking oil, and rice.
In 2024, we will dive fully into empowering this coalition of millers and private companies to coordinate and design tailored technical training and business advice, product testing support, and online tools and resources, which will also help millers reduce their compliance risk and enhance production efficiency. We look forward to seeing members benefit as their fortification quality improves and they gain greater recognition for product quality and industry leadership.
3. Following the map to enhanced cashew growth
In 2024, we are excited to see how farmers will benefit from a map showing the growth of cashew trees across West Africa. The map will build off of TechnoServe’s work with the University of Minnesota to build a map based on satellite cashew mapping research in Benin. The researchers captured images of Benin farmland with drones and used machine learning to analyze them.
The work incorporated a guide that TechnoServe developed for the Prosper Cashew project in Côte d’Ivoire and data that a University of Delaware team collected with “helmet cams” in Nigeria. Now the work will expand beyond Benin to other countries in West Africa, such as Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and Senegal.
The map will be an important tool for TechnoServe to make recommendations to governments about where to plant crops and how to use farmland for better growth. It will also identify which farmers can benefit from training from TechnoServe. We look forward to how this map will expand and develop in 2024.
Stay tuned for more updates about our work over the coming year!
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