Establishing strong baselines for living income in coffee with Global Coffee Platform (GCP)

The Global Coffee Platform (GCP) is a membership-based, multi-stakeholder initiative that unites coffee producers, traders, roasters, NGOs, and governments around one vision: A thriving and sustainable coffee sector for generations to come. Their mission is to promote farmers’ prosperity, improved well-being and conservation of nature, and by 2030, they aim to achieve transformational change on prosperity for more than one million smallholder farmers.

Akvo supports GCP by acting as its global data partner, helping design and implement rigorous baseline studies. These baselines inform each country plan, identifying priorities and making better-informed decisions for farmers and implementing partners. Over time, it will enable GCP to measure progress.


Partners

Global Coffee Platform (GCP)


Sector

Agriculture


Services

 Impact Strategy

Data collection at scale

Data analysis and insights creation


Location

 Brazil

Uganda

Kenya

The challenge

Across coffee-producing countries, detailed, recent, and reliable data on farmer livelihoods is fragmented. Each Country Platform operates in a different context, with varying actors, coffee types, and levels of data capacity among users. Without harmonised data, it is difficult to set measurable targets or track progress toward reducing the living income gap. GCP Country Platforms coordinate pre-competitive collective action across farmers, supply chains, and public partners. While these activities are vital for impact, they leave little capacity within the country teams to design and execute large-scale data collection exercises. 

 

The solution

Akvo led the end-to-end execution of the baseline studies for three Country Platforms for GCP. This begins with the design and scoping phase, where we define the sampling approach and prepare survey instruments aligned with GCP’s MEL framework. During this stage, we also coordinate closely with GCP’s affiliated Country Platforms and their implementing partners to ensure tools and methods fit the local context.

Next, in the data collection phase, Akvo manages the entire process on the ground: recruiting and training enumerators, piloting the tools, and conducting farmer interviews. Daily quality checks and supervision ensure high data reliability throughout the fieldwork.

Finally, in the data cleaning and analysis phase, Akvo processes the data and delivers both clean, anonymised datasets and actionable insights. These include results against GCP’s MEL framework as well as detailed analysis of farmer incomes, living income gaps, and sustainable practices. As a member of the LICOP, Akvo is always up to date with the latest developments in the Living Income methodologies and aligns its work to this. 

Through this full-cycle approach, Akvo enables GCP to generate robust, comparable baselines that Country Platforms can use to steer their work and track progress toward improving farmers’ livelihoods.

The impact

The Brazil pilot baseline demonstrated the feasibility of collecting high-quality data within a short timeframe, producing clean datasets and a robust baseline report. Building on this, GCP has now implemented baselines in Uganda and Kenya, covering hundreds of farmers across key Arabica and Robusta regions.

The result is the first set of comparable, country-level baselines across GCP’s programmes. These enable:

  • Clear measurement of progress toward living income goals
  • Evidence-based decision making for national platforms and partners
  • Stronger alignment between global ambitions and local realities

By working together, GCP and Akvo are laying the groundwork for targeted interventions that improve farmer livelihoods and resilience in the coffee sector, while also contributing to the wider sector’s understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing coffee farmers.

Lessons learned

Reliable baselines require more than strong methodologies. They require tools that reflect farmers’ realities. In our coffee surveys, we found that commonly used sector terminology does not always translate on the ground. Many farmers are unfamiliar with formal certification names or labels such as “wet” and “dry” processing, even though they clearly understand and practise the processes themselves. This reinforced the importance of carefully phrased questions and well-trained enumerators to ensure both clarity and comparability. We also refined our approach to capturing off-farm income by asking how income is received, how often it was paid in the past year, and the amount earned per payment. This shift improved accuracy and provided deeper insight into income stability. Finally, coffee requires commodity-specific survey design. Because farmers often sell in multiple forms, volumes and prices must be recorded separately to prevent inconsistencies and further strengthen the quality and usability of the analysis.