Detail

Cocoa in Bundibugyo is grown without synthetic inputs, but producers rarely capture quality or Fairtrade premiums due to bulk sale through intermediaries.

By digitising purchasing, plot, quality and compliance data, the project enables direct, transparent trade and channels a share of margins into an agroforestry reinvestment fund, financing shade trees, land restoration and climate-resilient farming across three pilot sites.

SusChain evolves from a traceability tool into an integrated marketplace, supply chain and reinvestment infrastructure, free for cooperatives while ensuring full data ownership.

Its key innovation is the reinvestment model: instead of relying on voluntary funding, agroforestry investments are financed progressively through real trade flows, particularly a SusChain premium built into the trade margin, creating a market-based mechanism for restoring degraded land.

Gender is a practical implementation priority: the project promotes balanced participation of women in the local team and partner cooperatives, with a focus on involving women and young professionals. It improves women producers' access to training, data, certification and market information, strengthening their role in the value chain, and introduces a digital grievance system for more inclusive feedback.

The model is designed to be modular and replicable: the cooperative-focused software platform, compliance/monitoring modules and the agroforestry fund can be adapted to other cooperatives, regions and commodities such as coffee.

As trade volumes grow, additional resources generated through economies of scale can be reinvested to finance further resilience-relevant areas along the supply chain.