WHAT WE DO
AGROFORESTRY MODEL
Our model is specially designed for small and marginal farmers who have fragmented and often degraded land. Our model helps them to reduce their risk from farming while also ensuring their income, food and nutritional security. We focus on a low cost, low risk but high impact model.
The agroforestry model includes plantation in paired rows and intercropping of tradition food crops, both of which help in ensuring food, nutrition and income security for our farmers. As our farmers belong to BoP with no access to irrigation facilities, we encourage improved varieties of traditional crops like millets and pulses which require less water and give better yield with little care and management.
INCLUSIVE BUSINESS APPROACH
We build bridges between businesses and the less privileged for mutual benefit. For businesses, these include driving innovations, building markets and strengthening supply chains. And for the poor, these include access to essential goods and services, higher productivity, sustainable earnings and greater empowerment.
SAI’s Inclusive Business Approach (SAI’s IBA) integrates smallholder farmers into the corporate value chain, where they grow pulpwood next to traditional crops in paired rows. It uplifts smallholder farmers’ families to above the poverty line while ensuring sustained raw materials supply to paper mills, and improving the natural ecosystem to combat global warming.
SAI’s IBA brings to the farmer’s doorstep: access to finance, quality inputs, training & capacity building, technical monitoring and market access. At maturity, we organize the supply chain with assured buyback at the market rate as we have direct linkage with markets.
BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM PROMOTION
We believe that grants, charity, technology or market alone cannot sustainably solve the problem of poverty. Therefore, we promote a special eco-system which we call Business Ecosystem, where different stakeholders, including communities; companies; investors; technical experts; and social entrepreneurs work together on the challenge of permanently eliminating poverty and also getting mutually benefited. We, at SAI, make this Business Eco-system a success.
We bring these actors together to provide critical support to small and marginal farmers through appropriate market analysis; enabling farming technologies; technical know-how; access to finance & quality inputs, together with value chain management.
SOUTH-SOUTH COOPERATION
The SAI model has been selected among proven business models from eco-inclusive enterprises around the world by SEED Replicator – a global partnership for action on sustainable development and the green economy. The SEED team shared the SAI model in African countries through regional workshops and conferences. As a result, SAI received requests from Uganda, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya to replicate our agroforestry model in those countries. We have been providing support to local partners in these countries replicating the SAI model through field visits and technical backstopping.
