Big Interview
Delivering partnerships with companies who want to demonstrate leadership
Kiran Grewal catches up with new Director of Commercial Partnerships,Kerrina Thorogood, who heads up all of the programmes and partnerships at the Fairtrade Foundation
A
s Commercial Partnerships Director, I lead a fantastic, highly skilled and passionate team of people who forge partnerships with organisations – companies, donors, NGOs and coalitions - that share our ambition and commitment for delivering measurable impact at scale for farmers and producers. Core to our work is of course the Fairtrade certification. A powerful and critical market-based mechanism that ensures products are sourced against a set of ambitious social and environmental standards, producers are paid a Fairtrade minimum price or the market price, whichever is highest, and then on top farmer cooperative receives an additional premium to be spent on social and environmental good in the community.
Fairtrade is also increasingly working in strategic partnerships that are seeing us broaden our approach to deliver the solutions farmers desperately need. We work with partners on supply chain solutions and programmes; on joint advocacy to shift the whole sector or government policy; on fundraising for mission support; or on inspiring our joint audiences to be part of a movement that calls for a fairer and more sustainable food system. And our programmes are going from strength to strength. Last month Fairtrade was one of a group of stakeholders delivering programmes under the FCDO’s Vulnerable Supply Chains Facility. The programme was awarded an A++ score which meant ‘Substantially Exceeding Expectations’. The highest score in the FCDO system with only 2% of FCDO projects being ranked so highly! This is complete testament to the expertise and knowledge the team has built in programme design and delivery.
You spent many years at WWF, why was joining Fairtrade important to you?
I actually received the call about the role while I was at COP26 in Glasgow. I’d just been listening to speeches from farmers from the global south (some hosted by Fairtrade!) and indigenous people who were thankfully much more present than they had been at previous climate talks.
6 Kennedy’s Confection July 2022
“Fairtrade had just launched its new 2021-2025 Strategy – The Future is Fair - an ambitious global response to a changing world. It felt like
there was no better time to be supporting producers in the first mile of the supply chain”
Their message was clear. Climate change was not an issue coming down the pipeline but was happening right now. Cocoa producers like Bismark Kpabitey from Ghana gave a powerful speech about reduced harvests due to rising temperatures and unpredictable weather events. And how the average cocoa farmer still earns on average as little as a dollar a day but we expect him or her to pick up the costs of adapting to these changes.
It really opened my eyes to the fact that farmers will need a fair and just food system more than ever in the next five years; and Fairtrade, an organisation co-governed by producers and working directly in the first mile of the supply chain, was the organisation, model and movement to achieve this and one that I really wanted to be part of. Reassuringly business was also showing leadership at COP,
with clear commitments to reducing carbon and building more resilience in supply chains. There was a clear mandate for partnerships with Fairtrade to deliver change, and with my background as Head of Partnerships at WWF, I hoped that I could add real value where I felt it would be needed most.
KennedysConfection.com
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