Establishing a living income baseline for coffee farmers
Carble helps coffee brands reduce their carbon footprint by rewarding coffee farmers for the carbon they store in forest canopies. In order to monitor carbon storage, as well as how farmer livelihoods are impacted by these carbon-payments, Carble needs reliable data on carbon storage, income, and the living income gap. Together with Carble, Akvo piloted an approach to measuring income and estimating the living income gap using a short survey. This reduces the burden of data collection on farmers while saving resources and improving data quality.
Above: Photo by Wirestock on Freepic.
The challenge
In order to provide its clients with reporting on carbon storage and livelihood outcomes, Carble needed to establish both an income and carbon baseline for each area of interest its clients are sourcing from. From our experience with measuring income, we know that income measurement surveys can be very long, ranging from 350-700 questions, and take about 1-2 hours. One of the objectives of this pilot was therefore to test a lean survey to measure the living income gap.
Having previously commissioned impact surveys and performed field research myself, I am aware how extensive and demanding income and wealth surveys can be on both the research team and especially on the farmers. They are sometimes asked to spend over 2 to 3 hours answering questions! Sometimes, even with such extensive surveys, issues of recall or privacy do not allow us to gather quality data or it is simply not possible to verify the reliability of the data as we do not have a reference.”
Sander Reuderink, CEO of Carble
The solution
Akvo designed an approach to calculating living income and the living income gap using a survey that could be conducted in less than 30 minutes. The data was collected among a sample of 75 small scale farmers. We consulted all partners involved in order to develop a lean income measurement survey that excluded irrelevant questions while tailoring the answer options for farmers. In the next phase, we calculated the living income gap using the Consumer Price Indices (CPI), inflation rate, and the OECD modified equivalence scale. We analysed the gap by disaggregating the data on farm size and type of coffee.

The impact
From this pilot, we have learned that estimating the living income gap is possible using a shorter survey, although we cannot assess the quality of the data due to limited secondary data sources available. We encourage other actors to publish or share data on the living income of coffee farmers in Ethiopia so that we can compare our results. Likewise, we are interested in collaborating with other actors to pilot a short income measurement survey in other contexts.
Akvo was attentive and able to think creatively to meet our needs. With the team we defined that we needed to build a survey that: is fit for purpose, collects minimal raw data and is conscious of our (and our stakeholders') resources. Quality data is crucial for measuring our impact. With the help from Akvo, we have built a survey that will help us reward a million farmers for preventing the next gigaton of CO2 from entering the atmosphere by 2035!”
Sander Reuderink, CEO of Carble
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