Published 7/23/2024
In 2023, The Koppert Foundation supported 24 projects that focused on smallholder farmers, corporate social responsibility and educational initiatives. Since its inception in 2017, the Foundation has aimed to enhance the quality of life for people worldwide by offering solutions that improve social, economic, environmental, and health circumstances. The Koppert Foundation, has released its Annual Report for 2023, showcasing its ongoing commitment to improving global agriculture through sustainable practices and education.
2023 Project highlights
Geographically, Africa received most of the funding, with 9 projects, followed by Europe, Asia, and South America. In 2023, the Koppert Foundation supported 9 smallholder farmer projects in 7 different countries. In total, 23.150 farmers (and consequently the same number of families) were reached with these projects, of which some have been running for multiple years.
These projects included sustainable cardamom production in Guatemala, improved maize production in Malawi, a school gardening programme in Uganda, education on sustainable farming in Zimbabwe, agroforestry projects in Kenya and Uganda and sustainable disease control in tomato in India.
The Koppert Foundation was also active in education projects. Koppert employees provided lessons on biocontrol at the IMC weekend school in Rotterdam, together with our partner EWS-KT the Koppert Foundation developed training modules on IPM for smallholder vegetable growers and also supported the CABI invasive species compendium and Resilience Food Stories.
In addition, several individual initiatives by Koppert employees were supported. Quite a number of our colleagues actively volunteered in social projects. They were supported either by a financial contribution for the organisation or with extra free time to undertake activities. They included a sponsor walk for KWF (Dutch cancer society), different gardening projects with a social aspect, ‘Sinterklaas’ for families that depend on the Food Bank, and initiatives to support people in the earthquake area in Syria/Turkey.
An overview of the projects funded can be found in the 2023 Annual Report of the Koppert Foundation.
New organizational structure
In 2022, the Foundation established a governance structure comprising a board, a steering committee, and three working groups dedicated to smallholder farming, education and innovation, and social responsibility. Under the leadership of the general manager, Johannette Klapwijk, the Foundation started several pilot projects in 2023 to transfer knowledge on sustainable farming methods, leveraging Koppert products in smallholder settings. Additionally, it continued with established projects.
‘What we aim for is not merely financial support, but also our added value, which is our knowledge on solutions for sustainable farming. An example is our project with Heifer to improve cardamom production by smallholder farmers in Guatemala. Together with our distributor Popoyan we set up a programme which considerably improved the quality of young plants. Another example is the development of a programme for the biological control of bacterial wilt in tomato in India together with our partner East West Seed Knowledge Transfer.
It is encouraging to see how enthusiastic smallholder farmers become when they see that crops can be produced without the heavy use of chemicals (pesticides and fertilizers) they believed were necessary, and it even brings them a higher yield. This is what we hope to achieve; that the farmers themselves become ambassadors of environmentally friendly ways of growing healthy food.’