Part II: Our impact In line with our mission, we provide financial services and business support to producer groups to help them build resilient and sustainable businesses, increase their income, and improve their living conditions. We believe that, by providing increased access to finance smallholder farmers and artisans are empowered to work towards the reduction of poverty, the promotion of economic growth and social development in their communities. Through investment from our members and the support of donors and partners, we continue to grow our lending portfolio to impact communities across the globe. Our internal Monitoring and Evaluation Committee works to develop a methodology and appropriate tools to monitor and track the impact of our lending, and the support we offer to businesses across the globe. We recognise that there are external factors, which also contribute to the outcomes of the businesses we work with. In addition, through various data collection methods we aim to demonstrate the effect of our financial support. These include surveys, interviews, focus groups and case studies to collect our impact data. As Covid-19 travel restrictions remained in place in 2021, we could not meet face-to-face with our Producer Committee. However, we were able to hold most of the meetings virtually, although this did pose some connectivity challenges. In regions that experienced significant connection issues, we collected information via telephone interviews with customers, which allowed us to gain a deeper insight into their activities. Overall, we gained insight from the following groups:
Five producers from Central America (Nicaragua (3), Honduras (1) and Mexico (1) growing coffee, honey and sesame and peanuts. Eight producers from Peru growing coffee and cocoa. Eight producers from East Africa (Rwanda (4) and Uganda (4) all producing coffee. Eight producers from West Africa (Ivory Coast (4), Ghana (1), Togo (1) and Burkina Faso (2) of cocoa, fruit, grains and handcrafts.
The producer groups we finance support 374,249 farmers and artisans (2020: 352,122), an increase from last year due to new customer accounts. From this year’s overall figure, 33% are women (2020: 35%) and 8,262 are permanent employees (2020: 8,516). We estimate, based on annual review data, that collectively, these businesses earned £887.9m. This is an increase from last year’s total of £802.2m.
Organisations were asked about topical issues such as their current level of demand for finance versus the level of supply in their region. They also discussed what they valued most from finance providers, where they would go to find finance, the benefits of working with Shared Interest and how we could improve our customer service. Finally, there were also discussions on successes and challenges faced during the year, including the impact of climate change and the pandemic. For the second year running, we designed a Customer Survey (Appendix 16) based on the outcomes outlined in our ToC. The main purpose of the survey is to help monitor our progress towards these outcomes and to better understand the impact of our activities and operations. We sent the online survey to 92 producer groups across our portfolio and we received 45 responses. The survey was also carried out via telephone with a sample of six buyer customers. Combined, these two exercises provided us with responses from 79 organisations.
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