School children walking down a road

Where Fairtrade needs to do more

Fairtrade is an evolving system committed to learning how our approach can improve to make a bigger difference for farmer and worker communities around the world.

Although a lot has been achieved over the last twenty years, our vision is ambitious and there is always more than Fairtrade can and should do to extend its impact to more vulnerable regions and difficult-to-reach groups.

Our own research along with insights from our field staff and external experts highlight areas where Fairtrade needs to do better and deliver deeper impact for farmers and workers. These include progressing faster towards a living wage in our Standards, doing more to extend Fairtrade’s core work to farm workers, empowering women farmers and workers, tackling power imbalances in supply chains, building effective climate change resilience within communities and scaling up our work within countries. These are challenges that we acknowledge and are progressing to address through future strategies.  

Fairtrade International is committed to communicating the results of monitoring and evaluation processes internally, and to using relevant findings to learn and to influence strategy, planning and decision-making. Analysis of monitoring data and evaluation results is shared with key governance bodies in Fairtrade. It is also being used as an input into planning and standards-setting processes.

Fairtrade’s governance bodies also review summaries of key results and learning from evaluations regularly. Evaluation results are made publicly available and shared with staff throughout the Fairtrade system. It is Fairtrade International’s policy that every evaluation process includes dissemination, learning and feedback opportunities, where results are shared with relevant stakeholders, and used as the basis for further discussion of findings and recommendations.

Take a look at our blog to find out more about some of the challenges Fairtrade faces.