In 2021, Idomit Agro launched a farmer-empowerment initiative in Cote d’Ivoire built on a simple promise: train smallholders, supply quality inputs, and guarantee to buy back 100% of what they produce.
The programme paired hands-on agronomy training with access to better planting materials and farm inputs, then removed the single biggest risk smallholders face, finding a reliable buyer, by committing to purchase their entire harvest at agreed terms.
The result was stable, predictable income for an entire farming cooperative, alongside measurable gains in crop quality. For Idomit, it secured a dependable upstream supply of raw material; for the farmers, it turned subsistence cultivation into a bankable livelihood.
The model is now a template for how Idomit intends to grow its supply base across the region: shared value, not extraction, with farmers as long-term partners rather than one-off sellers.
1 Comment
Aicha Kone
The buy-back guarantee is what makes this model work on the ground. For most smallholders here the hard part was never growing the crop, it was finding a buyer who would actually show up. Removing that uncertainty changes how farmers invest in their own plots, people put far more into quality inputs once they know the harvest is already sold. Good to see it framed as partnership rather than extraction.