GREENCoffee Vietnam

The GREENCoffee project aims to support 100.000 coffee farmers in the region of the Central Highlands in Vietnam (Dak Lak, Gia Lai, Kon Tum and Lam Dong provinces) with targeted information on weather conditions, best practices and market information. As a result, farmers will increase their yields while using less inputs and consequently realize more profit. The project runs for 3 years (2016-2019) deploying these services and scaling to a mature and viable business. WaterWatch Projects is coordinating the digital information service provision in the GREENCoffee project. Due to climate change the Central Highlands of Vietnam are suffering more and more from droughts and rainfalls (click for more information). This causes production losses for coffee farmers as well as regional household water shortages. Also, there is an increased occurrence of pest and diseases affecting the quality of the crops and the yield. Some farmers in the area of Dak Lak in Vietnam, have reported significant reductions in yields and high control costs resulting in the uncertain economic viability of their farms.

According to a study of the Vietnamese Community Development Center, the Vietnamese small coffee farmers lack the information to anticipate these changes. Accurate information on the weather (rain, humidity, extreme weather events etc.), pests and crop diseases as well as best practices of farming is currently lacking (click for more information). The GREENCoffee project fills this gap by building a system to provide the farmers with timely and accurate information via SMS and in dedicated mobile apps based on satellite and other geo-information sources. The system will be financially sustained using subscription fees for farmers and B2B (business to business) service models to other actors in the coffee value chain e.g. roosters, traders etc. Once these services are developed they will be easily extended to other types of crops and/or implemented in other regions in Vietnam.

The GREENCoffee consortium consists of the following public and private organizations, each with their own expertise. The lead organisation is ICCO South East Asia (Netherlands/Indonesia). Other partners are: AKVO (Netherlands), MARD/IPSARD (Vietnam), eLEAF (Netherlands), MARD/NIAPP (Vietnam), ERIPT (Vietnam), Nelen and Schuurmans (Netherlands), TTC Mobile (Netherlands), UTZ (Netherlands), WaterWatch Projects (Netherlands). The project is funded by the G4AW (Geodata for agriculture and water) facility of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.