Summary
This report combines insights from Rainforest Alliance research and field experience, and third-party literature to help answer the question: What strategies are effective in enhancing incomes? The paper divides income enhancing strategies into three levels: farm level, such as training in good agricultural practices and financial literacy, as well as income diversification efforts; market level, such as the provision of price premiums, contract farming, and efforts to improve farmers’ negotiating powers; and enabling policy environment level, such as strategies addressing systemic drivers of inequality, market inaccessibility, and broader economic forces that coffee farmers face. The report recommends that these strategies do have income-enhancing effects and should be components of wider campaigns to close living income gaps, whilst recognising that their success is dependent on the context in which they are implemented. Interventions are more likely to succeed when they are tailored to local realties and farmers’ needs.