A weekly priced transparency product for African coffee and tea producers, cooperatives and processors — showing the benchmark indicator side by side with the farmgate price, so the people who actually grow the commodity can see whether the price they're being offered is fair.
Start with Kenyan coffee against the Nairobi Coffee Exchange indicator. Extend to tea and to other African commodity chains as the data access allows.
A weekly report plus a simple dashboard that takes one commodity in one producing region and shows the benchmark indicator price alongside the typical farmgate-to-benchmark spread — what the benchmark was, what farmers were paid, and what that gap means for today's negotiation.
The first release covers Kenyan coffee against the Nairobi Coffee Exchange (NCE) indicator. The benchmark side uses publicly available data; the farmgate side is built from cooperative-reported and publicly documented ranges. Both are clearly labelled as to source and class.
The product answers one question every producer asks: "Am I getting a fair price?" Today, that question is answered by whoever the middleman is. This is the neutral, Nairobi-based, method-published alternative.
The aggregators that pay farmers and sell through NCE or Mombasa. They need to justify the farmgate price they set, and to negotiate with buyers from a position of knowing the benchmark.
Private tea processors and coffee washing stations/exporters that buy from farmers and need the benchmark to price their own purchases fairly and competitively.
Agencies funding smallholder value-chain projects who want to measure and close the farmgate-to-benchmark gap. A 6-month study period is a natural fit.
Bodies that oversee multiple cooperatives and need a shared, neutral reference point for the benchmark-to-farmgate relationship across their membership.
A London-based data vendor can give a cooperative ICE coffee futures prices. It cannot tell that cooperative what the NCE indicator was last week and what that means for the farmer price they're about to set.
The payback is one transparent negotiation. If the monitor helps a cooperative hold a fair farmgate price once, it has paid for a year.
We scope the first monitor release with you: the commodity, the region, the benchmark, the update cadence, and the price. No commitment until the scope is clear.