We Farm

URL = http://wefarm.info/

Description

"WeFarm is a project from the Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation (CPF), a UK-registered charity who works with smallholder tea, coffee and cocoa farmers and their organisations. Their current programmes reach ~280,000 smallholders across 12 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. CPF was established to be an organisation led by smallholder producers, for smallholder producers – and to work in pioneering, ‘bottom-up’ ways to improve livelihoods and reduce poverty. The idea behind WeFarm was born in to 2009 as an innovative communications platform to enable peer to peer knowledge sharing between this diverse group of producer partners around the world, who had a great deal of knowledge and ideas to share, but very limited access to tools that would enable this.

From 2009 to 2012 the pilot phase of the project, funded by the Nominet Trust, worked in partnership with four smallholder producer communities across Kenya, Tanzania and Peru, and the award winning creative agency Airside, to design and test a pioneering concept system. A proof of the WeFarm concept was successfully achieved – real-time, multilingual knowledge sharing by with farmers in 3 countries with no access to internet (we believe this was a world first!)

In 2012, with funding from Innovations against Poverty, a business plan and model were developed with support from Stephen Rockman. Based on this plan we envisage WeFarm scaling in the future as an independent enterprise; generating revenue to become self-sustaining and return value to farming communities.

Funding to develop a full launch system, capable of being scaled quickly to thousands of farmers worldwide was received from the Knight Foundation in 2012, and ‘WeFarm 1.0′ is expected to be launched in August 2014.

This next ‘launch’ phase of WeFarm, which we hope will reach 100,000 farmers by end 2015, is being designed with support from SomeOne/Else, Manifesto and Conker Group. We are very excited to be on the verge of releasing this hugely exciting and innovative project at scale!" (http://wefarm.info/about/)