Diversity

To realize our bold goals for farmers, we’re building a diverse team and inclusive culture that will power our next phase of growth. We aren’t perfect: we aspire to be a more diverse and inclusive organization than we are today. So we have developed a five-year strategy to keep ourselves focused on progress and hold ourselves accountable to results. Below we share our core commitments and recent progress in each area.

Diversity of background and experience

We do our best work for farmers with diverse perspectives at the table. We’re deeply invested in building a workforce that is as diverse as the communities we serve, with a particular focus on nationality, gender, and farmer perspective.

Our staff is proudly 99% African overall, and 65% of our management team positions in Africa are filled by African nationals. For each of the past five years, we’ve continued to hire more nationals of African countries into senior roles. In 2021, we filled 78% of our open management positions (Associates and above) in Africa with nationals of African countries.

Access to opportunities

All our people deserve opportunities to do the best work of their careers. We’re firmly committed to clear standards for performance, and to provide the resources people need to do their jobs well and to grow professionally.

We standardized our job expectations and promotion process globally in 2017, and we continually seek to add clarity and reduce bias. Each year, we review key processes to ensure that we’re consistently rewarding excellence and realizing the full potential of our people.

An inclusive culture for all

We’re at our best when we draw on differences and learn from our colleagues’ diverse life experiences. We’re cultivating a workplace culture where all staff from all backgrounds feel welcomed, valued, and encouraged to contribute. 

As we grow, we must be more intentional about defining our culture and making it more inclusive. In 2019, we defined nine key tenets of our organizational culture with input from 5,000 staff in 10 countries. With a vision of our ideal culture in place, we all know what we are working toward.