Forest and Farm Facility impact stories

The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) is a partnership that strengthens forest and farm producer organisations to secure their rights, organise their businesses, sustainably manage their forests, and provide social and cultural services to the poor and marginalised. These impact stories show how livelihoods have been improved and landscapes made more climate-resilient.

Forest and Farm Facility branding leaf mandala

Impacts that are focused on outcomes

The work of the Forest and Farm Facility is framed around four key outcomes, which support forest and farm producer organisations and their members to thrive, and help the environment on which they depend for their livelihoods to be protected.

1

Shaping enabling policies

Advocating for new or revised policies and legal frameworks to better support the livelihoods of forest and farm producer organisations.

2

Incubating sustainable businesses

Supporting forest and farm producer organisations to establish and expand businesses, and to access economic markets and financing.

3

Upscaling climate and nature action

Ensuring forest and farm producer organisations use landscapes in a way that increases climate and nature adaptation, mitigation and resilience.

4

Enhancing social and cultural protection

Increasing equitable access to social and cultural services by forest and farm producer organisation members.

Support us

We are currently looking for funders for the next phase of the Forest and Farm Facility. If you would like to support the organisations driving forest and farm solutions, get in touch with IIED’s principal researcher and director of forests, Duncan Macqueen, via [email protected]

All content

Explore 29 resources

A partnership between FAO, IIED, IUCN and AgriCord, the Forest and Farm Facility is funded by Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, Finland, the United States of America, the Netherlands and IKEA.

The Forest and Farm Facility (FFF) strengthens forest and farm producer organisations – member-based organisations of smallholder and family farmers, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, including women and youth groups – to deliver climate-resilient landscapes and improved livelihoods.

Direct financial support from FFF strengthens forest and farm producer organisations to deliver four main outcomes:

  1. Shaping enabling policies
  2. Embedding sustainable business incubation processes into their organisations
  3. Upscaling nature restoration and climate action, and
  4. Providing social and cultural protection services to their members.

There are more than 1.5 billion smallholders around the world that depend on forest landscapes for their food and livelihoods, and FFF is estimated to have delivered positive impacts to some 30 million producers globally since 2012.

The collective scale of their organisational action across forest landscapes leads to substantial impacts that increase food security, foster more biodiverse and climate-resilient forests and farms, upscale carbon sequestration, and develop more inclusive business models that reduce poverty while conserving traditional biocultural heritage.

A careful monitoring and learning process has documented impacts since 2018 against the four outcomes, such as:

  • 34,668 representatives of forest and farm producer organisations participating in policy advocacy, leading to 336 changes of local to national policies
  • The installation of business incubation services in 73 umbrella, or ‘apex level’, farmer organisations, leading to increased value addition across 505 enterprises
  • The restoration, protection and sustainable management of 668,693 hectares of forest landscapes, and 
  • Increased access to social or cultural services for 282,659 people.

Now examples of those headline impacts are being brought together for the first time in this interactive repository, which provides details of almost 100 impact stories, categorised by country and four distinct outcomes, to demonstrate the tangible ways that FFF is delivering such impacts at scale.

“What this work shows is that direct financing of forest and farm producer organisations through the FFF partnership has been extremely efficient and effective,” said IIED’s director of forests, Duncan Macqueen.

“The huge collective membership of forest and farm producer organisations gives scale. Their direct dependence on the sustainability of forest landscapes gives motivation. Their need for holistic integrated solutions gives opportunity.

“In short, small investments that harness their strength in numbers can leverage substantial impacts.”

FFF is a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), IIED, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) and AgriCord.

Contact

Duncan Macqueen, director of forests: [email protected]