Funding Partners are public or private entities that fund Better Cotton’s organisational activities and projects at farm level, directly contributing to our 2030 Strategy and paving the way towards achieving impact for smallholders worldwide.
Funding Partners are more than just investors – their support offers valuable advice and guidance along the way to pilot new approaches and/or scale up valuable concepts.
They are truly partners in everything we deliver, and we are proud that they are part of the Better Cotton journey. Becoming a Funding Partner means that you are part of the story and can make Better Cotton a reality.
“Better Cotton is one of our key partners to improve sustainability in the cotton sector. Its broad reach – covering stakeholders from farm to shelf – is a great fit for our approach at GIZ’s Initiative for Sustainable Agricultural Supply Chains: facilitating collaboration among supply chain actors. Better Cotton is well-positioned to tackle sustainability and human rights issues and provides plenty of professionalism, determination and creativity to find good solutions. We’re happy to support them on their mission and look forward to continued cooperation!”
Meet Our Funding Partners
Projects Funded by Our Partners
Here are two examples of projects that closed in 2023. Both were funded by our partner GIZ:
GIZ India: Promoting Better Cotton Farming Practices in Maharashtra, Better Cotton Sustainability, and Value Addition in the Cotton Economy Phase I & Phase II (2020 – 2023)
The GIZ-funded project in Maharashtra promoted environmental and socially sustainable agriculture practices among approximately 200,000 farmers. The project led to higher yield and income, and enhanced connectivity to markets. Phase II of the project had a special focus on improving gender equality and addressing child labour within the farming community. Our field facilitators delivered gender sensitisation training to both men and women farmers, fostering an understanding of the different roles, experiences, and expectations associated with women in cotton, challenging stereotypes and gender-based discrimination. Women farmers also benefitted from joining self-help groups and farmer producer organisations, where they received support and guidance with marketing their cotton and additional livelihood activities.
GIZ, Due Diligence Fund: Enhancing traceability in raw cotton supply chains in Pakistan: Engagement with informal actors between the farm and the gin and building a Better Cotton Unique Bale Identification System in Pakistan (BCUBIS) (2023)
The BCUBIS project initiated collaboration with informal actors in the first mile of the cotton supply chain in the Sindh and Punjab provinces of Pakistan, actors that we had not previously engaged with. The project showed us that intermediaries are willing to engage with Better Cotton, meet our requirements and share data, improving the traceability of cotton at the beginning of the supply chain. Under the scope of the project, we also developed a Bale Tagging System which is operationally feasible for ginners in Pakistan, allowing us to trace Better Cotton from gins to spinning mills. The learnings from this pilot have informed our plans for lot-level tracking, enabling and facilitating traceability back to the gin.
Ongoing Projects
Three examples of projects ongoing in 2024 and beyond:
H&M: Regenerative Agriculture in Warangal District, Telangana, India (2023-2026)
In collaboration with WWF India and H&M Group, we are supporting 7,000 farmers to adopt regenerative practices to improve the soil health and carbon sequestration properties of their land. We are promoting practices like:
- Minimum to no tillage
- Crop diversification and cover cropping
- Organic manure and composting
- Natural resource conservation
- Use of bio-pesticides
We will work with farmers and local stakeholders to plant 10,000 trees, sequestering 31.6MT of carbon and increasing soil organic carbon by at least 20% across 5000Ha. We are actively recruiting women field staff to increase the participation of women farmers and forming self-help groups for training on regenerative practices and additional livelihood activities.
ISEAL Innovations Fund (funded by SECO): Promoting robust greenhouse gas accounting, reporting, claims and incentives: approaches for agricultural commodity supply chain (2023 – 2024)
Measuring and reporting on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions – particularly Scope 3 emissions for farms in complex supply chains – is a shared challenge for many agricultural sustainability systems. This project will explore existing GHG data collection and reporting principles in agricultural commodity production and how they can be applied inclusively. It will leverage insights from ISEAL past projects and will advocate for the role of agricultural standards in GHG accounting, reporting, claims and farmer incentives. This project is possible thanks to a grant from the ISEAL Innovations Fund, which is supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).
Afreximbank ‘Route Du Cotton’ C4 project: Sustainable Cotton Production for Smallholder Cotton Farmers – West & Central Africa (2024).
With Afreximbank’s support, we are conducting baseline assessments in Benin and Cote D’Ivoire that will inform programme interventions to improve cotton production quality and address the needs of smallholder farmers. This grant is critical for the design of the start-up programmes in Cote D’Ivoire and Benin and is part of the larger C4+ consortium Call For Action, an inter-agency collaboration which commits to bringing transformative change in the cotton industry in C4+ countries.
