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As you navigate through the Toolkit, you may have questions about shaping your vision, and exploring the possibilities when defining your living income project. This Resource Library brings together materials that explain key concepts, showcase use cases from different contexts, and highlight practical approaches tested in the field. Use them to inspire your project design, strengthen your rationale, and connect your interventions to proven strategies for achieving a living income.

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White Paper:

The Living Income Commodity Strategy builds on existing methodologies from Fairtrade International (Living Income Reference Price), True Price, and GIZ, while extending their applicability to farmers who are not certified. Within the repository, it explains the rationale behind the methodology and positions it as a practical mechanism to ensure that value concentrated at one end of the supply chain trickles down to farmers through targeted investments, clearly defined gaps to be closed, and income impact that can be monitored and quantified. This approach is an essential step in refining pricing and living income interventions: moving towards more transparent pricing mechanisms and genuinely sustainable value chains.
  • Access the document here
  • Access the FAQ here

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Case Studies repository:

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1. Latin America: Coffee

Honduras Coffee
Honduras – Coffee
Applied the Living Income Price (LIP) and Cost–Yield Efficiency (CYE) tools with Molinos de Honduras (Volcafe) to map cost drivers, inefficiencies, and opportunities among supplier farmers.
Outcome: Influenced corporate policy through farmer segmentation as a crucial step in defining targeted interventions with clear KPIs and objectives, highlighting gender-based cost differences and efficiency gaps.
Use:
  • Validated results with 30 farmers during the Laboratorio de Ingreso Digno, fostering data ownership.
  • Integrated findings into the “Volcafe Way” farmer support programme to close income gaps.
    Special feature: Direct private-sector integration, with recommendations embedded into ongoing supplier programmes.
Access it here

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2. West Africa: Cocoa

Honduras Coffee
Sierra Leone – Cocoa
Following the creation of the first Living Income Benchmark by KIT in Sierra Leone, we applied the LIP and CYE in the country’s cocoa sector in collaboration with Solidaridad West Africa. Together, Fairfood and Solidaridad collected and analysed farmer-level data in five cocoa-producing districts, with Akvo supporting the identification of four farmer profiles.
Outcome: The first district-specific action points for input access, replanting, post-harvest handling, and youth inclusion.
Goal: Influence national cocoa policy. Findings will inform the Ministry of Agriculture and Produce Monitoring Board to engage the private sector on fair pricing.
Special feature: National policy relevance, creating an evidence base for systemic interventions in an emerging sustainable cocoa market. Peer-review currently happening, including the Produce Monitoring Board, who was invited to write the foreword of the case study reflecting on the potential uses of the study in the West African cocoa sector. Access it here

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3. Coming soon:

The approach is being tested across different projects and programmes. This repository is expected to soon include other studies from:
  • Uganda: Coffee (Ndugu), developed within the RECLAIM Sustainability! Programme
  • Uganda: Coffee (Wakuli), continuation of Ndugu via GIZ Due Dilligence Fund (2025-2026)
  • Uganda: Coffee (Ugacof), Developed within the EIT Food program (2025-2027)
  • India: Spices, developed within the Social Sustainability Fund (SSF)
  • Ghana: Shea, developed within the Social Sustainability Fund (SSF), together with Solidaridad West Africa