Cross-cutting insights from our portfolio

Evidence from our portfolio makes this clear. In our regenerative cotton program, we have seen that women’s collectives adopted regenerative farming practices at a higher uptake rate than their male-led counterparts. This delivered better outcomes for the farming system as well as the businesses that depend on it. 

Through the Mastercard Foundation-funded Women in Sourcing and Enterprise (WISE) program, 53,231 farmers were reached and 96,833 young people acquired work, with approximately 85% women’s participation. In Ghana, guaranteed off-take agreements were identified as a critical incentive for young women to enter tomato cultivation, providing stable year-round pricing and reducing exposure to seasonal volatility. These findings reinforce a broader pattern visible across our portfolio: where markets provide predictable commercial conditions, women and youth are more able to invest, remain economically engaged and participate in value chains over time. 

Yet, it’s important to state that participation is where IDH’s gender and social inclusion work only begins. Increased participation does not automatically translate into control over income, assets or decisions. Where structural barriers persist in access to finance, land or contracts, benefits remain uneven. Addressing these dynamics is central to how markets function. 

Rather than representing a departure from the ambition of gender equality and social inclusion, this pattern reflects a shift in how it is positioned within market systems. For IDH, this reinforces the need to embed gender and youth considerations directly within the economic logic of value chains, in procurement practices, access to finance, service delivery models, and sector governance, rather than treating them as standalone components.  

Taken together, the evidence points to a consistent conclusion: inclusion is not an add-on to market systems. It is part of how those systems function, and where it is constrained, performance and resilience are constrained with it. And as IDH, we work with our partners on putting the right pre-conditions in place for broader sector level changes to take place.  

This is increasingly where IDH’s institutional role sits: helping sectors build the shared infrastructure that allows sustainability to move beyond fragmented – and often unscalable - testing or individual corporate initiatives. Traceability systems, procurement frameworks, living wage methodologies, sector governance platforms and landscape approaches become most durable and scalable when they are collectively owned, operationally embedded and financially sustained beyond any single program or organisation. 

IDH's ability to work at this level depends on three specific things. We understand how companies think about value chain risk, which allows us to shape the business case for collective action. We have built government relationships over years, relationships that project-by-project organisations cannot replicate. And we can see and connect the middle layers of value chains - traders, cooperatives, processors and agri-SMEs that global buyers cannot reach directly but that determine whether sustainability commitments translate into farmer outcomes.  

A good example of this are the banana living wage commitments. These have been initiated under the sector work on fruit and vegetables. Without a clear sector approach where private companies were brought together on a common need, these commitments would not have been so successful. The clear benefit of these commitments for companies is the possibility to organise actions in a joint and effective way. Working together creates impact at scale at a lower cost.  

Many initiatives within IDH Sector Initiatives have been organised using the membership fee model. As such private sector takes the ownership and brings the costs associated to the management of these initiatives under their budget, whereas IDH support on the knowledge and convening level.  

The sector level is where testing business cases and voluntary initiatives become shared practice and, ultimately, market infrastructure. This happens when companies, governments, farmer organisations converge around a common solution and institutionalise them as part of their governing frameworks, sector agreements or broader policies and regulations. In 2025, we saw this evidence of IDH contribution to sector level change coming together. Traceability systems and farmer databases that IDH and partners had been developing for years became operational necessities under the EUDR. The ILO Living Wage Resolution and the World Social Summit declaration in Doha gave institutional standing to living wage frameworks that IDH had been building with partners for over a decade. 

The ultimate test of the resilience and durability of progress at sector and landscape governance is when project and program timelines conclude and IDH or other initiating partners step back or change their role. Governance platforms, shared tools and policy frameworks only demonstrate their value when they continue to function and can be financed without the organisations that helped create them. Designing exit strategies is core to our approach to ensure the initiatives we drive can sustain and scale themselves independently, and without us in the room. 

What we have seen from our work over ten years of convening landscapes is that there is a business case for pre-competitive collaboration. An independent analysis from Vietnam's Central Highlands shows that achieving regenerative outcomes collaboratively at landscape level cost up to fifteen times less than when companies acted individually. The knowledge and tools built on top of our Landscapes Program are now publicly available through SourceUp, where organisations can explore over 65 existing landscape initiatives by commodity and country.  

The Life and Building Safety Program (LABS) illustrates this pattern well. It was designed for independence from the start and now operates without IDH co-funding, reaching over 1.3 million workers across Vietnam, India, Cambodia and Indonesia, and contributing to national fire safety standards that apply far beyond the factories IDH directly supported. LABS is one example of a broader pattern we see across our portfolio: initiatives where IDH's most important contribution was creating the conditions for others to contribute and lead. 

By the end of 2025 IDH transitioned out of the different international sustainability Sector Initiatives it helped to create and host, support or advise in the past 15 years: SIFAV (Fresh Fruit and Vegetables), FSI (Flowers), SSI (Spices), SVI (Vanilla), SJC (Juices), SNI (Nuts) and ASC (Aquaculture)2. Over the past years they all matured into financially self-sufficient initiatives with active governing bodies, maintaining their influential role in their sectors as active sustainability platforms.  

Alongside landscape programs and other initiatives, from 2021-2025, IDH has invested in building data and insights tools and public knowledge resources that generate ripple effects well beyond our direct reach. These tools are foundational pieces of our broader work on Better Income, Better Jobs and Better Environment and will be outlined in more detail. These assets shift behaviours at sector level, not through direct engagement, but through making evidence on what works accessible to anyone who needs it. 

Additionally, IDH has also contributed to building initiatives that are now fully owned and financed by the private sector. IDH's role in these is not always visible as it is also changing as we adapt together with our partners. We often play a role in initiating, convening and getting things off the ground. Over time, as sectors develop their own capacity and ownership, our role shifts: from convenor or co-funder to advisor. Sometimes we exit entirely.  

Catalysing investment is the final and perhaps most structural part of this story. Transforming agricultural markets requires capital at a scale that public funding alone cannot provide. One of the most persistent barriers is that smallholder agriculture and agri-SME finance remain perceived as high-risk by mainstream investors, leaving farmers and the businesses that serve them chronically underfunded. Over the past six years, the IDH Farmfit Fund has worked to change that perception by demonstrating that viable, impactful investments can be made in smallholder agriculture. Across 18 investments in 15 companies, the Fund has contracted 55.7 million in investments and mobilised over €150 million in co-financing, with investees expected to reach six million farmers through services, credit and off-take(assuming investments reach full potential and deliver projected targets). The overarching objective is not to create dependency on IDH's instruments, but a financial sector that treats smallholder and agri-SME finance as a mainstream asset class. 

Tracing and measuring what outlasts us remains a genuine challenge and a priority for the next cycle. The chapters and case studies that follow show where and how this has already been happening in 2025 as the final year of our 2021-2025 strategic cycle.