Country Platforms are locally driven initiatives which allow national and international, and public and private sector stakeholders to collectively identify country-specific priorities and work together to address them.
GCP’s two-tiered strategy highlights the important work GCP embarks on with its network of National Coffee Sustainability Platforms in six key coffee origins: Brazil, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda and Vietnam. This collaboration is essential to meeting GCP’s 2030 Goal of transformational change that aims at significantly advancing smallholders’ prosperity and sustainability, measured by closing at least 25% of the living income gap for more than one million smallholder farmers in more than 10 countries.
Through the Country Plans for Farmer Prosperity for each origin, GCP focuses on ensuring coffee farming’s economic viability, as it is the key underlying issue our sector needs to address to be able to work on the other systemic challenges and ensure that coffee is produced sustainably. Without addressing economic viability, farmers won’t have the means to adapt and mitigate climate change, deforestation, human rights violations, and other key issues that threaten the supply of coffee and ability to meet new regulatory requirements. Promoting farmer prosperity also ensures that coffee farming remains a viable business for future generations of farmers, thus ensuring the long-term supply of coffee supply chains and the coffee we love.
The GCP Country Plans for Farmer Prosperity (Country Plans), are multi-year plans to address the key barriers to farmer prosperity and sustainable coffee at origin . Co-developed with each country’s public-private National Coffee Sustainability Platform (Country Platform) with inputs from GCP’s global membership, each Country Plan contributes to GCP’s 2030 Goal by defining how much of the Living Income Gap they will close, for how many farmers. Strategies align to the Coffee Sustainability Reference Code, e.g. productivity, climate change, working conditions, regenerative agricultural practices, supply chain efficiencies and maintaining market access .
Implementation is over three phases. After piloting the interventions, the successful practices will be scaled up through private and government organizations. Progress will be measured against defined indicators to understand if the activities are achieving desired results or to adjust as we go.
Tackling systemic challenges like the lack of farmer prosperity means we need to work differently. Building on the success of GCP’s Collective Action Initiatives, these Country Plans target the national coffee sector as a whole, rather than individual supply chains, to create lasting change. The Country Plans focus on interventions at the pre-competitive level that are implemented collectively, bringing together both public and private sector actors to pool resources and enhance the scale of their collective impact.
Each Country Platform that is part of this journey is part of the GCP Network. Through its online Learning & Exchange Series and in-person events like the GCP Country Congress, GGCP Country Platforms benefit from cross-country, peer-to-peer exchange where they can learn from each other’s experiences and benefits from best practices that they can apply to their own origins to improve the roll out of their own Country Plans.
As locally driven initiatives, the Country Plans aim to create lasting change. Implemented through the Country Platforms , who bring together the key public and private coffee stakeholders in each origin, Country Plans are built on local priorities and benefit from the wider sector’s buy-in. Working through existing, locally-owned structures further strengthens the capacity of each country’s coffee sector, instead of creating parallel, one-off efforts that may not last after a project ends.
The platforms play an essential role in creating a more enabling environment for sustainable coffee production. This is seen in their advocacy and convening work, which influences policy change and sharing best practices and lessons learned with the wider sector. The platforms also help to create tools and institutional memory for the public extension systems via the National Sustainability Curricula (NSCs), country-level guidelines on good agricultural and sustainability practices for coffee farming. NSCs are regularly updated to reflect emerging best practices, which will include the results of implementing the Country Plans.
