coffee&climate Toolbox

Design Statement

Our Creative Director Boris says:

Coffee farming around the globe is hard manual labour provided by small holder coffee farmers – and nowadays they are facing the direct effects of climate change.In order to adapt their decades-old farming techniques, we don't just want to rely on 1:1 coaching on site - we bring low-threshold digital and barrier-free knowledge about climate-resilient coffee cultivation to the countries of the world via a progressive web app toolbox.

Criteria

Idea

In many rural regions heavily dependent on coffee farming, the effects of climate change, such as prolonged droughts and unpredictable harvests, are severely impacting agriculture. This requires adopting innovative practices that boost resilience to climate change, enhance resource efficiency, and support sustainable livelihoods. Beyond just modernizing agricultural techniques, it's crucial to equip farmers with the necessary knowledge and tools to adapt and thrive. coffee&climate envisioned a digital toolbox to share agricultal knowledge to adapt to climate change effects with as many small holder families as possible.

Form

Public statistics and surveys conducted by c&c employees around the world have clearly shown that even in the remote and poorest coffee regions of the world, access to the internet is now standard - albeit with major challenges. A digital toolbox that can be accessed from any internet-enabled device, intuitive design and language-independent operation ensure that as many farmers as possible can use the valuable content. Picture loaded step-by-step guides, culture-independent illustrational how-to-videos and and AI assisted translations help to lower the barriers of partizipating.

Function

We deliberately opted for a progressive web app: it offers all the functions of an app, but can also be installed on any device with an internet connection without an official app store for cheap or older smartphone models without Google or Apple accounts. With real offline storage, illustrated videos even for illiterate people, persistant to-do-lists and AI-supported translation even into rare languages, we make the information accessible to all farmers. A community feature allows coffee farmers around the world to share their techniques for climate-resilient agriculture, network and help each other improve their farming practices.

Differentiation

The initiative for coffee&climate and its public partners have been committed to responding to climate change and developing solutions for smallholder coffee farming and training on site in the villages for over 14 years. Now that digitalisation has also found its way there via smartphones, we now want to make this knowledge directly available to the smallholder families via a digital, accessible toolbox. The complete set of free of charge tools, available in all relevant languages as well as animated versions for illiterates as well as a barrier-free webapp was previously not available in the coffee farming sector around the globe.

Impact

The agricultural tools within the c&c Toolbox not only prepare smallholder families for the effects of climate change, but can also be used to act climate responsibly. These environmental benefits are also highlighted graphically within the app. For the development and operation of the app itself, attention was paid to climate-neutral server operation and absolute minimisation of travel through digital collaboration.