What 18 years have built
There are many ways to mark 18 years as an organisation. For us, it starts with a question we have asked since 2008: what keeps changing beyond our own involvement?
When IDH started, we set out to take sustainability from niche to norm.
Our mission has since sharpened: we build agricultural systems that endure beyond our contribution, resulting in value chains that generate shared value for all.
Nearly two decades on, we can begin to answer our question with evidence.
The case for work that endures has rarely been stronger. Regulations designed to encourage transparency and control at origin opened doors in some places and required rapid adaptation in others. Trade barriers are making market access less predictable and sourcing more costly. Climate pressure stopped being a distant, long-term risk and became part of day-to-day operations. In 2025, more than 200 climate-related disasters affected over 87 million people worldwide. Companies expect extreme weather to cost them close to US$700 billion in losses. The social picture is just as pressing. Living costs are rising while farm incomes stay low: rural areas, with agriculture at their core, account for more than three-quarters of people living in extreme poverty. It hardly pays to be in farming, and fewer young people choose it. At the same time, more companies are building climate and social risks into their sourcing. The work is moving into practice. This gives me real hope, because change endures when practice becomes everyday business.
What 18 years add up to
Since 2008, we have worked with companies across value chains from cotton, cocoa and coffee to grains, spices and fruit and vegetables. For every €1, we mobilise close to €3 in private investment. Together with partners, we have so far contributed to more than 10 million hectares of sustainable agricultural production, improved incomes for 7 million farming households and better working conditions for 1.9 million workers.
Between 2021 and 2025, €275 million of donor investment mobilised nearly €250 million and catalysed €550 million from our private sector, banking and other partners, resulting in a program portfolio of nearly €1.1 billion. We did this by using the power of markets: redirecting procurement, triggering investment, de-risking innovation and delivering at scale.
Two signs that change lasts
Two questions tell us whether change will last. First, does the work keep growing beyond our own involvement? Second, how far it shifts the fundamentals of business and market behaviour: how companies source, how investors allocate capital and how sectors govern themselves? The second question matters most. Once a practice becomes everyday business, it travels like a ripple into other sectors, markets and geographies and reaches people outside our own partnerships. Adoption and adaptation are the honest evidence of both, and they show up years after a program launches.
Much of what we started keeps growing. We co-founded the Aquaculture Stewardship Council with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in 2010, and it is now the leading global aquaculture sustainability standard. The Life and Building Safety program was designed for independence from the start. It now operates without IDH co-funding and reaches over 1.3 million factory workers in Vietnam, India, Cambodia and Indonesia. In Kenya, the Stawisha Mau Charitable Trust brings together more than 16 public and private stakeholders to carry forward the South West Mau forest landscape work.
Market behaviour has shifted too. We brought retailers in the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK together in the first supermarket living wage commitment for banana procurement. Under the IDH-managed Dutch Initiative for Sustainable Cocoa (DISCO), the first sector-wide procurement principles were agreed, and all European cocoa commitments have since embraced them. In Nigeria, a block farming model that clusters production and aligns it with off-take demand has increased the yield supplied to premium off-takers by 300%.
These are proof points. Turning them into the norm across whole sectors is the work that remains. Scaling has often taken longer than we hoped, and shifting procurement, investment and risk along the whole value chain proves as hard as the challenges we first set out to solve. Public policy, private sourcing and investment still move at different speeds, and scale works best when solutions stay tailored to local realities.
What IDH brings to what comes next
The world will not become calmer. Markets will keep pulling in different directions, regulation on transparency and control at origin will keep changing the rules for sourcing, climate pressure will keep arriving uninvited, supply risks will keep growing and resources for this work will become scarcer and more contested. In that world, businesses, governments and investors need a partner who can align their interests and investments and who has done it before.
We align interests that would otherwise stay apart. We understand what companies, investors, governments and civil society each need, and we connect them around shared agendas that no single actor would pursue alone. In Vietnam's Central Highlands, independent analysis of our coffee landscape initiative found that achieving regenerative outcomes collaboratively cost up to 15 times less than when companies acted individually.
We mobilise investment. We blend public and private capital to de-risk solutions and bring in commercial investors, so that every €1 draws in close to €3 of private investment.
We design for ownership. Everything we create is co-funded with the private sector, so partners co-create solutions with skin in the game. We build governance, standards and finance into the design from the start, so that sectors can own, finance and govern what they have built. It takes courage to trust partners to lead, take more risk together and keep adapting as conditions change.
We connect local insight to global demand. Our in-country and regional teams know how their markets actually function, and we link that insight to global demand, policy and capital. Our network of over 350 experts works with more than 900 partners in key markets and value chains worldwide.Most importantly, we leverage partnership, investment, policy and sourcing to contribute to national and local agendas for development. A people-centric approach, based on the plans of farmers, SMEs, cooperatives, local governments and civil society organisations.
After 18 years, we bring experience, evidence and influence to the table, along with the lessons we have learned along the way. We ask of every investment whether it builds a mechanism that keeps producing results, and each one we build adds to the ripple.
To our partners, colleagues and the many people we never worked with directly, those who carry this work forward: thank you. You are the ripple. We look forward to building what comes next with you.