Establishing a Living Income Baseline for Palm Oil Farmers in Aceh

Working with IDH, Akvo delivered the first full implementation of IDH's Income Measurement Guidance tool for the palm oil sector - establishing Aceh, Indonesia's first standardised living income baseline for smallholder palm oil farmers.

Above: Enumerator interviewing women farmer in North Aceh


Partners

IDH


Sector

Agriculture


Services

Data consultancy services


Location

Indonesia

The challenge

Palm oil smallholders in Aceh face real, largely undocumented income gaps. Without a standardised way to measure those gaps, neither IDH nor local partners had a reliable evidence base to inform policy or supply chain strategy - just anecdote and assumption in place of data.

 

The solution

Akvo applied IDH's Income Measurement Guidance tool for the first time in a full palm oil implementation, engaging local governments, farmers, and private sector actors throughout. Getting there took real capacity-building: Akvo developed and delivered enumerator training covering data-collection ethics, informed consent, survey concepts, use of Kobo Collect, data quality, and field protocols - backed by ongoing technical support and real-time supervision. The baseline itself ran on a district-embedded field model across five districts, a scale that meant this was never just "how to use an app," but building the local capacity to run a complex household income study consistently and responsibly.

The impact

The resulting baseline reveals the true scale of the income gaps facing Acehnese palm oil farmers and identifies their primary drivers - giving IDH, for the first time, a solid evidence base to inform policy and supply chain strategy in the region.