IDH is proud to release our 2025 Annual Report, which outlines our work with our partners to transform markets: building systems that endure beyond our contribution, resulting in value chains that generate shared value for all
Looking across our portfolio, a set of cross-cutting insights emerged from our own review of our reporting and evaluation materials for the 2021-2025 cycle.
These insights reflect what we observed across our work with partners, where progress took hold, where it proved harder to sustain, and under what conditions market change was most durable.
Supply security has become the most powerful entry point for sustainability investment
Where commitments became procurement decisions, market change followed
Women’s and youth economic participation is a structural condition for how markets function
Pre-competitive action achieved what no single company could do alone
The most credible evidence of impact is what endures without us
Our work during 2025 was significantly shaped by five external conditions: commodity markets that behaved very differently across sectors; regulation that brought both opportunity and disruption; climate pressures that moved from long-term risks to operational realities; a fundamental shift in how international cooperation is funded, and a rewriting of how companies engage with sustainability.
In the context of these external conditions, we saw patterns emerge, from which we were able to gather far-reaching and valuable insights from across our portfolio. Together they tell the story of how markets change, and where our contribution is most durable.
2025 was one of the most demanding operating environments the organisation has faced. Official development assistance fell by approximately 23% globally. A range of EU sustainability legislation became the defining regulatory force shaping how agricultural commodities are sourced and traded, although implementation and enforcement are still subject to fierce political debate.
Commodity markets moved in opposite directions across our portfolio: cocoa and coffee prices reached historic highs on the back of supply disruptions, while tea and cotton farmers faced structural oversupply and falling margins. Under the combined pressure of regulatory obligation, supply insecurity and reduced public funding, sustainability became more embedded in sourcing, procurement and operations. At the same time, companies grew more cautious about new public commitments and less vocal about existing ones. Against that backdrop, IDH met or exceeded most of its 2025 targets and delivered on the strategic objectives set for the 2021-2025 strategy.
What became increasingly visible across our portfolio is that sustainability transitions succeed when they become operational transitions: when climate resilience, labour conditions, farmer incomes, inclusion and governance are embedded into procurement systems, investment decisions and sector coordination itself. This is increasingly where IDH’s contribution sits: helping align the conditions that allow markets to shift collectively and durably over time.
Because 2025 closed a full strategic cycle, this report draws on more than a year's monitoring data. The independent evaluations, portfolio reviews and learning papers produced across five years provided a rich evidence base that allowed us to see patterns beyond the calendar year. Looking across that evidence, five findings stand out:
Our three impact chapters - Better Income, Better Jobs and Better Environment - each tell that story in full, moving through the same logic: what makes change commercially viable at farm, ecosystem and company level; what requires collective action across a sector; and what depends on the governance, regulation and capital conditions that no single program can create alone. Each draw on 2025 results from across IDH's value chain sectors and geographies, viewed against the five-year cycle as a whole.
The report also covers IDH's organisational development in 2025, including the recalibration undertaken in preparation for the 2026–2030 strategy, alongside our own environmental, social and governance performance and financial position.
In many agricultural and manufacturing supply chains, decent work remains the exception rather than the norm. Workers continue to face poverty wages, unsafe working conditions, and insufficient protection from exploitation, discrimination and harm. These are not only social risks. They are also business risks. Poor labour conditions affect workforce stability, productivity, regulatory compliance and sustained market access.
Agricultural markets depend on farmers choosing to farm. When income falls persistently below what a decent livelihood requires, when debt absorbs the gains a good season produces, and when the risks of staying outweigh the returns, farmers exit, choose alternatives or stop investing in their land. The consequences travel up the value chain. Companies that assumed production would always be available have spent recent years discovering that a reliable supply base cannot be taken for granted.
Many of current agricultural practices drive environmental degradation and contribute to climate change. Environmental degradation in turn drives agricultural failure.
In 2025, that cycle stopped being a background condition and became an operational reality. Supply disruptions in cocoa and coffee made climate resilience a boardroom priority (see also the chapter on income). The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), will make deforestation-free sourcing a legal requirement, albeit with a delay in the implementation deadline. Flooding in Aceh damaged 42,000 hectares of palm oil plantations while program delivery was underway. These were not risks on the horizon. They were events occurring within businesses’ operating year.
The outcomes described in this report rest on two conditions that cut across all three impact chapters: the ability to mobilise capital at a scale that public funding alone cannot provide, and the ability to convene competitors, governments and civil society around shared agendas that no single actor would pursue alone. These are the structural foundations of IDH's approach by which we aim to bring lasting market transformation through farm-level innovation, enabling conditions and sector-level governance.
*Cumulative results for 2025 against the 2021-2025 funding cycle
Read a reflection from IDH's Leadership on the year that was
2025 was a year of impact delivery, transition and resilience for IDH. As we closed the final year of our multiyear strategy, we are proud to see how the organisation delivered on an ambitious impact agenda despite unprecedented volatility in our operating environment. Across our global teams and partnerships, we met or exceeded most of our 2025 targets and as a result successfully delivered our 2021-2025 strategic objectives. This achievement reflects the professionalism, determination and adaptability of our colleagues and partners worldwide.
Over the past five years, IDH has grown into a mature, international organisation. With teams rooted in 18 countries and a workforce that is comprised of over 50 nationalities, we have strengthened our global presence and credibility. We have consciously evolved how we work - being bolder in addressing complex issues such as living wages and incomes, deforestation, gender equality and regional market transformation. Our partners played a critical role in this progress, helping us confront difficult topics with greater accountability, co-ownership and scaling potential.
2025 was a year in which transformation and delivery went hand in hand. As the organisation concluded its current strategic cycle, the Supervisory Board closely witnessed an ambitious recalibration designed to make IDH more future‑proof, resilient, and better positioned to carry out its mission in an increasingly complex world. The transition is both strategic and structural: the need for more impact requires innovation in our ways of achieving it. IDH needs to leverage the shift in donor dynamics which translates to an organisation able to adapt quickly and focus on partnership.
IDH's strategy aimed to contribute to three overarching impact areas: Better Income, Better Jobs and Better Environment. By 2025, what our portfolio showed with increasing clarity is that these are not separate agendas. They are connected, and that connection is where the real leverage sits.
Any lasting environmental transition ultimately requires good livelihoods for the communities that implement it. And vice versa: farming communities fully depend on a healthy and functioning natural environment. We have seen how climate disruption that drove part of commodity price volatility also destabilised farmer incomes, degraded the ecosystems that farming depends on and affected worker conditions. This feedback loops run in both directions: the conditions that make issues compound are the same. For example: investments that restore soil health can reduce input costs, protect surrounding landscapes and strengthen farmer resilience in the same action. conditions that, when addressed together, can make solutions multiply.
Running through all three chapters is a structural finding on gender equality and social inclusion: where women and young people are excluded from assets, income, services, safe workplaces and decision-making, the gains in income, jobs and environment do not hold. Inclusive markets are not only more equitable; they are more competitive, resilient and sustainable. This matters because women and young people face structural barriers to finance, land, contracts, safe workplaces and decision-making - and because resilient, regenerative production systems depend on the agency of the people managing them.
The chapters that follow each tell the story of how IDH has worked to bring about change in 2025 and building on the years before. Each chapter moves through the same logic: what makes change commercially viable at farm and company level; what requires collective action across a sector; and what depends on the governance, regulation and capital conditions that no single program can create alone.
To explore IDH’s progress in 2025, the documents below offer detailed insights into our organisational development, ESG performance, and financial results, offering a comprehensive picture of IDH’s operational resilience.
