Smallholder Farmer Development: International Donor Funding Trends

Marc Pfitzer, Valerie Bockstette, Simon Meier, Jessica Davies

Agricultural development, and more specifically, the critical role of smallholder farmers, has received renewed attention from the global community in the past few years. Smallholders represent one of the world's most exciting and important development opportunities: unlocking smallholder productivity and market access can lift millions of families out of poverty; improving yields of smallholders is imperative to addressing growing food security challenges; and smallholders are vulnerable to climate change, while improving their practices and productivity can help better preserve and protect resources. There are currently dozens of initiatives going on around the world at both the policy and on-the-ground funding levels–driven by multilateral, bilateral, corporate, and NGO actors and multi-sector coalitions.

In order to enable more coordination between these various initiatives, FSG and the Smallholder Coalition have catalogued and analyzed $12 billion in funding from 29 donors representing more than 1,700 smallholder-focused projects active from 2009 onwards. Our intention with this analysis is to provide the community of donors, corporations, networks, NGOs, and governments involved with smallholder development with a first-of-its-kind snapshot of the state of smallholder funding flow trends. The complete report is available below, as well as the ten individual country snapshots.

For more information on the Smallholder Coalition, please see www.smallholdercoalition.org.