Strategies for International Development helps poor farmers graduate from poverty by helping them build successful farm businesses that increase their income. This includes conserving the natural resources upon which their agro-businesses depend and helping women play an equal role in building these businesses.

Honesty and Transparency
Be honest and transparent about our successes, failures, results, and costs to farmers and donors.

Leadership and Empowerment
Use every opportunity to foster leadership and empowerment. Help farmers meet and negotiate with exporters, make business plans, select the practices they adopt, and evaluate their results. Help them do it. Don’t do it for them. And they become successful managers of their family-farm enterprises.

Commitment to Innovation
Continually strive to devise, test, evaluate, and promote better methods for helping poor farmers graduate from poverty. Continually search for innovations that increase results and reduce costs.

Equal Opportunity
Treat all farmers equally. Require equal participation of women, and hire women as well as men as project staff. Give every farmer an opportunity to increase his or her income and become a successful commercial farmer.

Complete the Job
Put farmers firmly on the path toward successful commercial farming before ending the project. Don’t do part of the job and leave the rest to others. You don’t need to take them all the way, but you do need to make sure they can go the rest of the way without additional assistance.

Share with Others
Share innovations with other NGOs and policy-makers, and learn from others as well. Organize best practices workshops, solve common problems, share lessons learned, and agree on best practices in order to increase the impact and coverage of all our projects.