Empowering Coffee Farmers with Digital Data Management

The importance of data within coffee and cocoa supply chains has grown significantly in recent years. Farmer-generated data is becoming increasingly important for informed decision-making, ensuring traceability, facilitating certification, measuring impact, and compliance with regulations. While digital tools facilitate data collection, they are often controlled by external actors—buyers, certifiers, or financiers—leaving farmers without true ownership or control over their own data, thereby creating dependency.

To address this imbalance, Solidaridad and Progreso Foundation have partnered to give farmers control over their own data through the Beyco farmer platform. In a pilot project in Colombia within the Climate Heroes programme of Solidaridad, seven coffee cooperatives adopted climate-smart agroforestry practices and used Beyco to digitize data collection, improve traceability, and link sustainability-linked data to carbon insetting. This case study presents the outcomes of this pilot.