In order to increase resilience to climate change, coffee farming households need the knowledge and skills to apply regenerative agricultural practices that can increase biodiversity, enrich soil health, improve watersheds, and enhance ecosystem services.

Nespresso’s AAA Sustainable Quality Program empowers coffee farmers through three pillars: coffee quality, farm productivity, and social and environmental sustainability. Improvements in these areas can boost farmers’ financial security while also helping their communities and protecting nature.

From July 2022 to April 2024, AAA agronomists — nearly half of them women — delivered monthly lessons to small, self-selected focal farmer groups of roughly 25 coffee farming households. Modules included a wide range of relevant topics, including regenerative agricultural topics (Coffee Pruning and Rejuvenation, Soil Health, Coffee Planting, and Shade Management and Climate Change), household nutrition topics (Nutrition Basics, and Establishment and Planting of Kitchen Gardens), and gender equality topics. With the establishment of demonstration plots, farmers learned through this hands-on, field-based training. 

Corruption in the forestry sector continues to undermine the rights & livelihoods of local & Indigenous communities. By institutionalising the use of ForestLink, we empower local communities beyond enforcement - the system has proven critical in tackling this corruption, enabling communities to document land rights violations & illegal activities, defend their territories & secure access to justice, whilst securing sustainable economic opportunities linked to forest resources.  

 Crucially, ForestLink supports sustainable economic activities & lays the groundwork for payment for environmental services by reinforcing community autonomy & stewardship of natural resources. Through partnerships with local organisations skilled in legal advocacy & sustainable enterprise, communities are supported to develop livelihoods aligned with forest protection. Key enabling factors include understanding current economic practices, ensuring financial support for legal actions & engaging in parallel advocacy to secure land rights.  

By actively managing and defending their lands, communities reinforce their autonomy & contribute to long-term, locally driven development. The data collected through the tool also plays a crucial role in supporting access to justice - providing evidence for legal & non-legal actions when communities face human rights abuses or environmental crimes.  

This digital tool's efficiency relies on the fact that it is accessible from remote areas & easy to use for local & Indigenous communities. 

It allows grassroots data to be gathered to feed national and global advocacy. Its adaptability also lies in the fact that it can be used to monitor a variety of issues (illegal logging - artisanal or industrial, mining, carbon market projects' impact, GBV, etc.), in a variety of contexts.   

The evidence is building that granting Indigenous peoples & other local communities' control over their territories improves forest protection, as they are directly invested in the survival of forests & want to ensure that future generations can continue to live & thrive in them. Yet a lot of development, environmental & climate-related programs are not created in collaboration with the people who will be impacted by them. Therefore, our solution arose from the challenges that grassroots organisations & Indigenous & local communities brought to our attention. Those communities are the ones living all the forests illegalities & land tenure violations. By directly tackling their challenge it ensures the solution to be genuine & efficient. Working with them directly helps us to better understand the contexts they are facing & adapt the tool in consequence.  

Contour Enviro Group further coordinate and create job opportunities for the MSMEs that have gone through the training programme so that they may practice their acquired skills. All of our MSMEs have acquired work since the inception of the programme and this has brought some sustainability on the model.

As mentioned in the previous sections, this programme is meant to achieve the following: “to develop, empower, support and professionalize Conservation MSMEs in the conservation sector in South Africa”. 

The programme has trained over 20 MSMEs and created over 400 jobs annually since 2022 based on this programme. This programme is the main building block for the Grasshopper Project Management Tool as it was realised that the MSMEs need some support and a consolidation of their project management efforts, access to basic financial tools such as quoting and invoicing. Furthermore, to manage their assets etc. 

NFTree seeks to make conservation economically competitive by increasing the opportunity cost of forest conversion. The model redirects resources toward conservation by integrating blockchain, MRV systems, and community incentives, channeling funds into a fiduciary trust. These funds are allocated based on territorial prioritization and community governance mechanisms that value the ecological function of native forests. Through this, NFTree offers an ecosystem-based alternative to traditional productive models such as extensive cattle ranching or extractive activities.

NFTree provides economic alternatives that make conservation viable and attractive. By assigning a financial value to conservation through tokenization and connecting it to real ecosystem services (e.g., carbon sequestration, biodiversity), the model enables a shift in local economic logic. Funds from NFT sales are funneled into a fiduciary trust and redistributed through community-designed conservation agreements. These agreements consider the ecological integrity of each territory and are managed collectively. As a result, economic activities shift away from degradation and toward ecosystem service provision, strengthening long-term sustainability and local resilience.