Achieving rural development, sustainable agriculture, and environmental conservation goals through integrated landscape management is a complex, long-term investment for stakeholders—how can the private sector, government, and civil society take steps to make this transformational approach a reality and provide benefits to stakeholders in the near term?
A collaboration among the Livelihoods Venture, Brookside dairy company, Vi Agroforestry, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission, and local producers in the Mount Elgon region of northwestern Kenya provides insight into how working to generate shared value through supply chain efforts has the potential to expand over time into a landscape partnership.
This article is the third in a series of stories about landscape partnerships that effectively include private sector actors that were showcased at the Business for Sustainable Landscapes Workshop, organized by EcoAgriculture Partners, SAI Platform, IUCN, and Sustainable Food Lab at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center May 31-June 2 2016. You can find the other stories, along with key messages from the meeting and more information on the Business for Sustainable Landscapes Challenge Program, here.
Identifying opportunities for synergy and shared value
Lake Victoria is the largest tropical lake in the world and supports Africa’s largest inland fishery and a diverse range of wildlife. Upstream, the Mount Elgon region is the lake’s largest “water tower,” a critical catchment that feeds into the lake. These water supplies are threatened, however, by sedimentation from soil loss driven by deforestation and unsustainable livestock and crop cultivation. Local smallholders and dairy farmers face significant challenges, too, as soil health declines and erosion increases. Decreasing yields have compounded the harmful impacts of poverty and a lack of market access and technical assistance. The opportunity for intervention to generate shared value— benefits to local community wellbeing, agribusiness success, and environmental improvements— was clear.
The Mount Elgon Region, Kenya, hosts a shared value initiative connecting local farmers and the dairy industry. Photo Credit: Nlorusso.
Engaging in ambitious collaboration
Through unexpected public-private-civic partnership, significant efforts have begun to create shared value on an impressive scale. By the numbers, the Livelihoods Venture and its collaborators are working to engage 30,000 farmers in more than 1200 groups and cooperatives in increasing smallholder yields by 30% through improved technical assistance and infrastructure, doubling farmer revenues by improving market access, planting 20,000 hectares of agroforestry to restore the watershed, and producing 1 million carbon credits over the next decade, building on previous work to connect smallholders with carbon markets in the region.
Scaling from supply chains to landscapes
A lynchpin of the effort is engagement by Brookside, a leading Kenyan dairy company. Using a shared value approach, the company is helping Mount Elgon dairy farmers be more productive and profitable, which in turn provides the company with a more secure and reliable milk supply. The company is also reducing its risks and improving its reputation by investing in watershed restoration and reducing potential dairy industry supply chain impacts downstream. Brookside’s efforts are an example of significant steps a company can take to move towards integrated landscape management in the areas from which it sources commodities. As the Mount Elgon region partnership advances its work, it will serve as a model for more companies and other stakeholders to do the same in landscapes around the world.
Catherine Rothacker is a Master of Environmental Management candidate at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she is focusing on the intersection of corporate sustainability, conservation biology, food production, forest governance, and sustainable development. She works for the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, and is currently completing an internship with EcoAgriculture Partners in Washington, DC.
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