Philanthropic Legacy

Creating Lasting Impact

Challenge

In 2016, the Martin family had successfully exited their third-generation agrobusiness and sought to establish a meaningful philanthropic legacy. They wanted to leverage their expertise in agriculture while addressing educational inequality. Their key challenge was creating a measurable impact across multiple European and African countries while ensuring efficient resource use and family engagement.

Our Approach

We helped the family establish a Belgian foundation with satellite offices in Kenya and Tanzania, created an efficient cross-border grant-making structure, developed a transparent governance framework and implemented a professional management team.

Our approach focused on a sustainable agriculture programme, regenerative farming practices, small-holder farmer support, agricultural technology adoption and market access improvement.

We helped develop an agricultural vocational training, a women in agriculture programme, youth entrepreneurship opportunities and digital literacy classes.

In order to help our client track their impact, we developed a comprehensive monitoring framework, created digital tracking systems, established an independent evaluation board and implemented regular impact audits.

We guided our client in creating a consortium with three leading European agricultural universities, helped establish partnerships with five regional farming cooperatives, facilitated collaborations with local educational institutions and helped develop relationships with government agencies.

To keep the family involved, we created next-generation involvement programme, established quarterly field visits, developed mentorship opportunities and implemented regular family impact reviews.

Outcome

Five years of strategic philanthropy yielded:

(01)

Agricultural Impact

With our guidance, our client’s family supported 8,724 farmers across East Africa, increased participating farmers’ income by an average of 47%, implemented sustainable practices across 12,000 hectares and created 15 agricultural training centres.

(02)

Educational Achievement

Our advisors helped establish three vocational training centres. The family provided scholarships to 3,250 students and helped achieve an 82% employment rate for graduates. We also assisted in creating a digital learning platform, reaching 4,800 students annually.

(03)

Foundation Growth

Our client’s initial commitment of €35M grew to €42M through strategic investment, with an annual grant distribution of €2.8M. Our assistance helped them successfully leverage an additional €15M through partnerships. Operating costs have remained below 12%.

(04)

Family Engagement

Through our encouragement, we reached 100% participation from second generation family members and 8 next-generation members actively involved on their new advisory board. Our advisors also instilled quarterly impact review sessions. 

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