International Not-For-Profit / Non-Governmental Organization (NGO)

Challenges

Our client is an NGO working in Central America – buying large blocks of agricultural land from landowners and selling smaller plots to the former tenant-farmer families. The new owner-farmers continue work their land, increasing the health and well-being of their family. Most were also able to create a surplus of food beyond their family’s needs, which they sold back into the local community at a very low profit. Although the NGO’s model successfully created “ownership vesting” among the village communities and improved nutrition for the poor rural farmers’ families, their living standards remained extremely low. Our challenge was to find a way to increase the standard of living for the new owner-farmers, as well as escalate the flow of funds into the NGO overall.

solutions

We donated our professional time pro bono to invent an approach that amassed the farmers’ excess food crop production, and brought it to the international food marketplace. Specifically, we designed a co-op model for the aggregation, preparation and shipping of large quantities of world- class vegetables – from the rural, mountain-side farms in Central America, direct to the global food marketplace. We even developed a staged growth plan, starting where the NGO was strongest in Guatemala, and spreading the co-ops to Nicaragua and beyond.

results

Ours was a strategic development role, positioning the NGO to implement the formulated program themselves. The profit margins on a container of top-notch specialty vegetables received into the Port of Miami and distributed through U.S. food brokers are astoundingly high. This process, when fully-realized to sustainability, was able to provide $2.5 million USD net profit annually to help further this NGO’s important work. We also recommended that the NGO share some of the profits with their local co-ops, and even the individual farmers based on their individual contributions – significantly raising the standard of living of both the farmers and their rural communities.