REGIONAL HIGHLIGHTS
Solidaridad, in partnership with Regenagri, introduced the world’s first insetting carbon standard. The efforts paid off when, for the first time, three tea plantation companies in Sri Lanka (Hayleys Plantations, Aitken Spence and Lumbini Tea Gardens) adopted the Regenagri Carbon Insetting Standard to tackle their Scope 3 emissions. The Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 2025 with Solidaridad as the sustainability partner for these companies.
We exceeded our targets for technical assistance and financial inclusion, reaching 62,380 producers and securing credit lines for 3,098 others. By delivering advanced EUDR compliance tools and de-risking corporate sourcing schemes, we transformed complex challenges into profitable, scalable market solutions. Furthermore, through pioneering carbon-backed agroforestry finance and small-scale mining formalization, we are scaling models across the continent that ensure economic viability goes hand in hand with environmental integrity.
Across East Africa, small-scale producers are driving the transition toward more resilient and sustainable agriculture, industrial and mining supply chains. By adopting sustainable practices, they are enhancing productivity, strengthening incomes and deepening their commitment to environmental stewardship. In 2025, Solidaridad — alongside strategic collaborators — advanced these efforts through targeted technical expertise, improved service delivery systems, stronger market linkages and supportive policy frameworks. Through our producer-led, partnership-driven approach, we demonstrated how agency, shared vision and coordinated support can transform supply chains. The impact is clear: economic gains, long-term resilience for small-scale producers and meaningful contributions to regional sustainability and development goals.
Solidaridad Europe engages donors, companies, knowledge institutes and civil society organizations to make global supply chains more sustainable. With offices based in the Netherlands and Germany, we work with various European partners to explore opportunities to create a sustainable and inclusive impact. Despite growing global rifts and challenges, we continue our work and collaborations with determination. This includes calling on various stakeholders to ramp up their efforts and take up their role in achieving a more sustainable and inclusive society. Our diverse and committed staff is key to realizing the vision and strategy of Solidaridad.
In Southern Africa we placed 162,861 hectares under sustainable management. Overall, 205,299 regional farmers accessed improved services, cementing our legacy of scalable agricultural transformation.
In 2025, Solidaridad West Africa deepened its work in sustainable agricultural practices and drove systemic policy reforms. We championed climate-smart agriculture and robust financial inclusion, helping over 76,732 cocoa, oil palm and cashew farmers to boost their yields and incomes amidst global and regional economic shocks.
Executive Summary
2025 at a glance
Building Resilient Livelihoods in a Challenging Year
Despite a challenging funding landscape, we have been able to achieve significant impact on farmers’ yields and income, reconfirming our focus on evident positive changes in farmers’ lives.
Dear friends,
Despite challenging climatic and contextual events, 1.3 million farmers saw their yields improve as a result of on-the-ground support from Solidaridad in good agricultural and farm management practices. Over 975,000 farmers experienced increases in their farm income due to improved yields, reduced costs, better farm management practices and improved price negotiation.
We successfully brought over 2.8 million hectares of land under sustainable management. This, among other activities, directly contributed to avoiding, restoring or removing 2,838 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.
These results were all driven by tailored regional strategies. In Asia, the scaling of regenerative agriculture—particularly through the Regenagri cotton initiative—directly boosted yields for over 800,000 farmers. In East and Central Africa, climate-smart dairy interventions increased milk yields by 46% per cow. Meanwhile, in Latin America, an integrated livestock and cocoa program in the Brazilian Amazon helped producers to achieve a 108% increase in average gross household income, while securing direct premium market access to major meat processors. In Southern Africa, the Hooves for Sustainability program successfully restored 150,000 hectares of vital rangelands.
Through collaboration with service providers, nearly a million farmers gained improved access to better, more affordable services and inputs. Through training and support on occupational health and safety, pollution prevention and decent work models, we’ve been able to improve working conditions for 226,000 workers, of which 41% are women.
Physical and digital innovations fueled the overall increase in impact. Southern Africa implemented a localized cotton seed multiplication system in Malawi that supplied nearly 29,000 farmers, slashing seed costs and generating an estimated 4 million euros in savings. In West Africa, the Harvest Alert digital platform successfully connected over 10,000 smallholders with professional farm services and transparent pricing. To advance decent work, Latin America launched tailored insurance products and de-risking mechanisms to provide formal credit to artisanal gold miners in Peru. Asia utilized a Gender Inclusivity Assessment Tool to improve workplace culture and promote female leadership in textile mills.
Our policy-influencing efforts materialized in long-term systemic change through 40 items of new or improved mandatory sustainability legislation, designed to promote and refine smallholder inclusive implementation. The Cocoa and Palm Oil Barometers challenged unequal value distribution, successfully pressuring major Dutch supermarkets to publicly pledge living income strategies. In West Africa, advocacy efforts led to the approval of the Quality Oil Palm Seedling and Coconut Pricing Mechanism Policies to protect fair value distribution.
We are proud of these results, especially because 2025 was a challenging year. Our income was reduced from 78.3 million euros in 2024 to 69.6 million euros in 2025 – mainly due to the termination of USAID funding. This required adaptation or termination of programmes, and a reorganization and reduction of staff in some regions. But we maintained a strong, field-oriented workforce of 1,665 staff members across the globe, demonstrating resilience despite a turbulent funding landscape. Globally, 85% of staff reported they would recommend Solidaridad as an employer.
This year also marked the end of our strategic cycle for 2020-2025. We have successfully developed and finalized the new Multi-Annual Strategic Plan (MASP) for 2026–2030, reconfirming the organization’s focus on resilient farmers in sustainable supply chains. We encourage you to read more about our new strategy here.
Building on the lessons learned and impact achieved in the previous strategic cycle, this new strategy equips and motivates us to improve the lives of farmers and workers even further.
Andre de Freitas
Executive Director, Solidaridad Network
The Solidaridad Network Foundation is registered as a foundation at the Chamber of Commerce in Utrecht, the Netherlands, under the number 51756811.
Solidaridad Network Foundation
‘t Goylaan 15
Utrecht 3525 AA
The Netherlands
Email: info@solidaridadnetwork.org
974,545
farmers with improved farm income
2.8 million
hectares under sustainable management
226,484
workers and miners with improved working conditions
2,838
tCO2 emissions avoided, restored or removed
321
service providers with increased turnover
60
new or improved mandatory sustainability frameworks
294
processors who have reduced pollution
308
corporates supported in sustainability solutions
996,743
farmers and miners with access to improved services
545
civil society organizations trained in decision-making and dialogue
1.3 million
farmers with improved farm yields
11,000
workers and miners trained
6,000
hectares with improved soil
1.9 million
farmers trained
18 million
individuals stimulated to purchase sustainable
Change that Matters Stories
Organization & Governance
Strengthening Our Core: Resilience and Integrity
Navigating a turbulent financial year while launching the 2026–2030 Strategic Plan, investing in staff development and new Global Performance Indicators with a strong focus on impact.
In 2025, we had a global workforce of 1,665 staff members. Asia is the largest region with 711 staff, mainly due to its large-scale on-the-ground interventions. Latin America is the second largest with 515 staff, anchored by Colombia with 242 staff members and Brazil with 83 staff members. In Africa, we employed a total of 329 staff members. We also had 83 staff in Europe and North America.
| Headcount 2025 | Female | Male | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asia | 179 | 532 | 711 |
| East and Central Africa | 48 | 53 | 101 |
| Europe | 53 | 24 | 77 |
| Latin America | 245 | 270 | 515 |
| North America | 4 | 2 | 6 |
| Southern Africa | 29 | 40 | 69 |
| West Africa | 61 | 98 | 159 |
| Other/global | 15 | 12 | 27 |
| Total staff count | 634 | 1,031 | 1,665 |
Globally, our workforce comprises 1,031 men and 634 women, with large regional deviations. Europe’s workforce was predominantly female (53 women to 24 men). North America and the office of the Executive Director also boasted female majorities. The staff of Latin America was relatively equally divided, employing 245 women and 270 men. Regions with remote field operations, such as Asia (532 men, 179 women) and West Africa (98 men, 61 women), had significantly more men employed than women. To counter this, these regions prioritized inclusive leadership. Asia actively worked to recruit women across all levels, successfully achieving a 25% female participation rate in 2025. West Africa intentionally promoted female staff into higher-responsibility and programme management roles to address its gender gap. East and Central Africa implemented mentorship programs that resulted in women assuming new senior and project management positions and a balanced workforce with 48 women and 53 men.
While the overall number of staff grew in 2025 compared to 2024, the changing global funding landscapes required several regions to adapt their workforce sizes and composition and reduce FTEs.
In 2025, we continued modernizing HR Systems and building a strong organizational culture. We condensed our organizational values (solidarity, impact-driven, solution-oriented and integrity) into a simplified list to help staff connect with them more easily. In the Solidaridad Staff survey of 2025, 87% agreed or strongly agreed that their colleagues behaved in line with these values. Furthermore, 85% of staff said they would recommend Solidaridad as an employer. This important internal survey measuring the organizational climate was filled out by 85% of our staff.
In all regions, there was significant attention for employee wellbeing, succession planning and psychological safety. We also scaled up our hybrid global onboarding programme, in which staff can follow training on topics related to strategy, communication, HR, Project Management & Evaluation, Governance, Finance & Fundraising and IT.
See below an overview of our staff and how it is spread across our countries of operations:
More information about our staff, management and supervision can be found here.
Across the Solidaridad network in 2025, safeguarding institutional integrity and fostering a safe, transparent work environment were major priorities. At the core of these efforts are the Solidaridad Code of Conduct and Whistleblower Protocol, which guide the prevention, monitoring and reporting of integrity issues. To ensure these standards were upheld, regions proactively rolled out capacity-building and compliance initiatives. Latin America strengthened its system by implementing a new integrity Action Plan aligned with global standards, and Asia conducted multiple online and country-specific trainings to enhance staff awareness of grievance policies and processes.
Globally, we managed 11 potential integrity cases or grievances in 2025. Southern Africa addressed one formal integrity issue—which was resolved via a formal agreement and subsequently referred to an external body—alongside three minor concerns that were handled internally by designated persons of trust. In Asia, five code of conduct breaches and grievances were reported in 2025. All issues were investigated and, where appropriate, formal warnings or corrective actions followed. Of the two cases in East and Central Africa, one is still under investigation. The other one was found justified and led to the termination of the involved staff members. Latin America resolved two reported issues, fostering trust and confidence among staff and partners. In West Africa, one integrity incident was reported, which led to the resignation of a staff member and a stricter enforcement of the related parties policy. In Europe, no formal integrity breaches were reported in 2025.
In 2025, Solidaridad’s communication efforts across the network evolved significantly, shifting from routine visibility activities toward more impact-oriented storytelling and strategic advocacy. Communications played a pivotal role in claiming thought leadership, driving inclusive policy changes and amplifying the voices of smallholder farmers and workers on the global stage.
Global Strategy and Brand Alignment
Solidaridad successfully consolidated its messaging under a unified “One strategy, one brand” approach. A new Global Communication Strategy was approved and rolled out alongside updated corporate branding guidelines to ensure professional, consistent messaging worldwide. Despite declining trust in social media, Solidaridad’s visibility and engagement increased significantly, particularly on LinkedIn, where we surpassed 1.38 million impressions.
Some concrete communication highlights and achievements in 2025 included:
- Solidaridad supported smallholder leaders to speak directly to decision-makers. For instance, Pedro Seijas from Peru addressed the global RSPO conference regarding the failure of credit markets and the need to shift from merely implementing sustainability to enabling farmers to make a living from it.
- We launched the “Solidaridad for Sustainable Asia” YouTube channel, which amassed over 15,000 subscribers in just six months.
- Through articles in the media, we reached a potential audience of 2 billion
- In Uganda, we launched a highly impactful radio and media campaign focused on responsible artisanal mining and child protection. By partnering with local mining associations, the campaign reached an estimated 500,000 people to raise awareness about the dangers of mercury exposure and advocate for keeping children in school.
- In Europe, we drove powerful public campaigns that successfully pressured major Dutch supermarkets—such as Albert Heijn and PLUS—to publicly pledge living income strategies for cocoa farmers.
- The 2025 Cocoa Barometer, the Palm Oil Barometer and the Cotton Rankings collectively reached hundreds of millions of readers and shifted media discourse toward smallholder inclusivity.
- East and Central Africa’s Managing Director received the Woman on Board Award and earned a nomination for the 2025 NGO Awards in the ‘Best in Agriculture’ category.
- The cocoa beans from the Tuerê program in the Brazilian Amazon secured almost 40 national and international awards, including a silver medal at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris.
- The Peruvian documentary film “Entre Polvo y Sueños” (between Dust and Dreams), which chronicles the reality of female miners, won an Outstanding Excellence award at the DocuVision International Film Festival.
- A multichannel campaign was developed to strengthen producers’ feedback in a qualitative impact assessment of the Colombian oil palm supply chain. The study’s online launch event became Solidaridad Latin America’s most-watched video to date, with more than 98,000 views on YouTube.
- We actively campaigned in and around COP30 in Brazil, highlighting a decade of climate-smart agriculture and forest restoration in the Brazilian Amazon.
- Solidaridad attended, organized and featured in numerous high-profile international events, summits and conferences in 2025. We directly engaged thousands of stakeholders by speaking at major international forums, including the Africa ESG Summit, the RSPO conference in Kuala Lumpur, the Africa Food Systems Summit, Amsterdam Cocoa Week and COP30.
Focusing on measuring what matters
In 2025, Solidaridad made a deliberate choice to become more impact-oriented. To measure our impact across all our programmes, we developed our 8 global Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aligned with the new Multi-annual Strategic Plan (2026-2030). These KPIs follow a value framework approach, which allows us to move away from simply counting things towards measuring what matters. These globally agreed-upon KPIs align with the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, and with globally recognized methodologies such as the Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and the Agricultural Viability Index. They have been developed to work as indices, capturing different dimensions of change.
Advancing learning and digital intelligence
We continued internalizing learning within our project cycle, prioritizing sense-making and pause-and-reflect sessions with internal and external project stakeholders to strengthen adaptive management. This progress included developing a global learning product on Technical Assistance that documents both successes and challenges. We progressed in our move from data to intelligence, investing and refining our digital systems to improve data aggregation and analysis, now incorporating AI-driven data modelling and prediction. We also improved data visualization through global dashboards, enabling reliable, real-time tracking of results. This makes it easier to make fact-based management decisions.
Accountability and Evaluation
Over 50 evaluations were conducted globally, including baseline evaluations, mid-term and end-of-project evaluations – all pivotal, either in shaping or adapting project strategies, generating critical insights for adaptive management or in understanding impact. A key milestone was the completion of the end evaluation of our five-year RECLAIM! programme, which assessed the impact of our advocacy and policy-influencing strategy across all regions. A catalogue with case-studies and lessons learned of the RECLAIM! Programme can be found HERE.
Finance
Adapting to Funding Fluctuations
Solidaridad secured 69.6 million euros in aggregated income in 2025, which was 8.7 million euros less than the previous year, mainly due to the termination of USAID funding. Government Grants remain the largest source of income (58%), making income diversification a high strategic priority.
N.B: all figures are pre-auditing.
Solidaridad secured 69.6 million euros in aggregated income from external sources in 2025. This was 350,000 euros above the secured budget, but 8.7 million euros lower than the 2024 income.
This is considered an overall positive result despite challenges in funding circumstances with changing donor priorities, the termination of USAID funding and the volatility of funding cycles.
| Income | |
|---|---|
| Income from individuals | € 1,150,075 |
| Income from companies | € 14,259,714 |
| Income from lottery organizations | € 4,390,626 |
| Income from government grants | € 40,678,073 |
| Income from non-profit organizations | € 6,326,406 |
| Income from other organizations | € 2,558,673 |
| Other income | € 1236,486 |
| Total direct income | € 69,600,052 |
60% of the 2025 income (41.8 million euros) was secured through the Europe region. The Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs remains our largest donor, contributing 43% to our income, predominantly through its programmes Reclaim Sustainability! and Pathways to Prosperity. Due to the termination of USAID funding, only 2 million euros (3%) of the 2025 income was secured through the North America region in 2025 compared to the 4.7 million euros (8%) in 2024.
The percentage of regional own fundraising decreased marginally from 38% in 2024 to 37% in 2025.
Income from Government Grants remains the main source of income at 58% of total income, followed by income from companies at 20.5%. Lottery income rose by 50% from 2.9 million euros to 4.4 million euros due to expanded Dutch and German Lottery programmes. Income diversification continues to be a high strategic priority in this period of changes in governmental funding priorities.
| Expenses | |
|---|---|
| Activity costs | € 2,791,485 |
| Other costs | € 2,585,915 |
| Partners and consultants | € 3,749,878 |
| Employee expenses | € 7,880,675 |
| Balance to be paid | |
| Total direct expenses | € 17,007,953 |
| Expenditure to Solidaridad entities | € 419,200 |
| Total expenditures | € 17,427,153 |
Aggregated direct expenditure for 2025 is 71.6 million euros, 2.6 million euros lower than the budget of 72.6 million euros and 9 million euros lower than the expenditure in 2024. The expenditure variances are mainly due to funding decreases, as expenditure is directly linked to the funding secured.
Expenditure in Africa represents 31.6% of total expenditure (2024 – 32%), while Latin America amounts to 23.7 % (2024 – 25.3%) and Asia 22.7% (2024 – 21.3%).
Solidaridad runs all of its programs and projects with their own staff although in some major programs, partners are contributing to achieving our objectives in the field. Activity costs are all costs related to the execution of our programs and projects in the field. Other costs are costs of a more operational nature related to running our offices.
The net aggregated results before non operating expenses reflect a net deficit of 100,585 euros and a surplus of 587,109 after non operating expenses. Non operating expenses include interest earned, bank charges and foreign exchange gains or losses.
Given the unplanned income fluctuations during the year, this can be considered a very positive achievement.
All information above is based on the unaudited figures over 2025.
The official audited financial statements over 2025 will be uploaded here as soon as they are available.