For over a decade, our partnership with Nando’s has focused on helping the company expand and deepen their commitment and practice of social and ecological justice. We have supported Nando’s by integrating small farmers, aspiring IT professionals, self-taught artists and furniture makers into their supply chains making them more inclusive and migrating resources from Europe and the USA into Southern Africa. Additionally, we have helped them deepen their employee knowledge to provide new services that contribute to their professional development, food security, healthcare, and education.
Our longest standing project partnership has been designing a small farmer supply chain for Nando’s peri-peri spice in Mozambique, Malawi, South Africa and Zimbabwe. This network of small farmers now provides 99% of Nando’s global demand for this key ingredient. After establishing the network, Impact Amplifier’s role has been to annually measure the impact of this cash crop on the 1,000+ small farmers who grow it. Exploring the impact a single cash crop can have on housing, energy and water access, children’s education, healthcare and food security. Based on the success of this programme, Nando’s has expanded the crops grown with this network and beyond to include paprika and cayenne pepper and we too have expanded our impact measurement work.
New Regions, New Crops, and Expanding Assessment Work
Our latest impact assessment work includes in-field studies in Zimbabwe and Malawi to establish a baseline for the new cayenne and paprika farmers within Nando’s inclusive supply chain programme. Data on crop yield, income levels, infrastructure, and resource needs creates a foundation for tracking future impact, measuring how these high-value crops affect farmer livelihoods over time.
Deepening our understanding of Food Security, Education and Energy
Although we measure a broad range of economic, social and environmental indicators in our impact assessments we have recently enhanced our methodology to expand our understanding of food security, education, and energy on the small farmers participating in Nando’s supply chain.
We changed our methodology to gain more insight into the cumulative impact on the participating farmers, beyond a single season, and in relation to other subsistence farmers in each of the three countries where crops are grown. These three indices are critical because: being food secure allows the farmers and their children to focus on other productive measures - education, commercial gain, and social connections; energy access which provides lights and charging facilities enables studying and commercial activities after dark; and, children’s education is a tool for realising new commercial opportunities other than subsistence farming or becoming more efficient and effective at farming. What we discovered is that the subsistence farmers in the Nando’s supply chain, in comparison to farmers in their respective countries with the same land size, education levels and family sizes, are:
These results are extraordinary and demonstrate that a sustained effort to source products from small scale subsistence farmers can have a long-term material impact.
Data-Driven Tools for Agricultural Impact
Over the 10 years Impact Amplifier has been conducting impact assessments we have continued to refine our tools and tactics. Tools like our “Impact Amplifier Basic Human Needs Index” which translates the everyday conditions faced by farmers into measurable data points, helping gauge improvements in housing, health, water, and education. We have also created the “Cost of a Resilient Life Index” which measures the cost of living at the community level to put earnings into perspective and track how macroeconomic conditions are translating into rural areas. Finally, we have digitised all our tools and assessments into platforms that allow for data visualisation and manipulation to gain a more granular understanding of the impact being made.
Delivering Sustainable Change with Nando’s Farming Programme
Our long-standing collaboration with Nando’s allows us to work across multiple countries, bringing targeted, locally-led solutions to diverse communities. Expanding the scope of our impact assessments to new crops and regions keeps us focused on clarifying which resources and skills are needed to achieve long-term growth and stability within each farming community.
Read more about our ongoing impact assessment work with Nando’s
Together with Nando’s, we are creating pathways to market access and economic resilience in underserved areas.
