In 2025, we had a global workforce of 1,665 staff members. Asia is the largest region with 711 staff, mainly due to its large-scale on-the-ground interventions. Latin America is the second largest with 515 staff, anchored by Colombia with 242 staff members and Brazil with 83 staff members. In Africa, we employ a total of 329 staff members. We also have 83 staff in Europe and North America.

Headcount 2025	Female	Male	Total
Asia	179	532	711
East and Central Africa	48	53	101
Europe	53	24	77
Latin America	245	270	515
North America	4	2	6
Southern Africa	29	40	69
West Africa	61	98	159
Other/global	15	12	27
Total staff count	634	1,031	1,665

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Globally, our workforce is comprised of 1,031 men and 634 women, with large regional deviations. Europe's workforce is predominantly female (53 women to 24 men). North America and the office of the Executive Director also boast female majorities. The staff of Latin America is relatively equally divided, employing 245 women and 270 men. Regions with remote field operations, such as Asia (532 men, 179 women) and West Africa (98 men, 61 women), have significantly more men employed than women. To counter this, these regions have prioritized inclusive leadership. Asia actively worked to recruit women across all levels, successfully achieving a 25% female participation rate in 2025. West Africa intentionally promoted female staff into higher-responsibility and programme management roles to address its gender gap. East and Central Africa (ECA) implemented mentorship programs that resulted in women assuming new senior and project management positions and a balanced workforce with 48 women and 53 men.

While the overall number of staff grew in 2025 compared to 2024, the changing global funding landscapes required several regions to adapt their workforce sizes and composition and reduce FTEs.

In 2025, we continued modernizing HR Systems and building a strong organizational culture. We condensed our organizational values (solidarity, impact-driven, solution-oriented and integrity) into a simplified list to help staff connect with them more easily. In the Solidaridad Staff survey of 2025, 87% agreed or strongly agreed that their colleagues behaved in line with these values. Furthermore, 85% of staff said they would recommend Solidaridad as an employer. This important internal survey measuring the organizational climate was filled out by 85% of our staff.

In all regions, there was significant attention for employee wellbeing, succession planning and psychological safety. We also scaled up our hybrid global onboarding programme, in which staff can follow training on topics related to strategy, communication, HR, Project Management & Evaluation, Governance, Finance & Fundraising and IT.

See below an overview of our staff and how it is spread across our countries of operations:

More information about our staff, management and supervision can be found here.

Across the Solidaridad network in 2025, safeguarding institutional integrity and fostering a safe, transparent work environment were major priorities. At the core of these efforts are the Solidaridad Code of Conduct and Whistleblower Protocol, which guide the prevention, monitoring and reporting of integrity issues. To ensure these standards were upheld, regions proactively rolled out capacity-building and compliance initiatives. Latin America strengthened its system by implementing a new integrity Action Plan aligned with global standards, and Asia conducted multiple online and country-specific trainings to enhance staff awareness of grievance policies and processes.

Globally, we managed 11 potential integrity cases or grievances in 2025. Southern Africa addressed one formal integrity issue—which was resolved via a formal agreement and subsequently referred to an external body—alongside three minor concerns that were handled internally by designated persons of trust. In Asia, five code of conduct breaches and grievances were reported in 2025. All issues were investigated and, where appropriate, formal warnings or corrective actions followed. Of the two cases in East and Central Africa, one is still under investigation. The other one was found justified and led to the termination of the involved staff members. Latin America resolved two reported issues, fostering trust and confidence among staff and partners. In West Africa, one integrity incident was reported, which led to the resignation of a staff member and a stricter enforcement of the related parties policy. In Europe, no formal integrity breaches were reported in 2025.

In 2025, Solidaridad's communication efforts across the network evolved significantly, shifting from routine visibility activities toward more impact-oriented storytelling and strategic advocacy. Communications played a pivotal role in claiming thought leadership, driving inclusive policy changes and amplifying the voices of smallholder farmers and workers on the global stage.

Global Strategy and Brand Alignment

Solidaridad successfully consolidated its messaging under a unified "One strategy, one brand" approach. A new Global Communication Strategy was approved and rolled out alongside updated corporate branding guidelines to ensure professional, consistent messaging worldwide. Despite declining trust in social media, Solidaridad's visibility and engagement increased significantly, particularly on LinkedIn, where we surpassed 1.38 million impressions.

Some concrete communication highlights and achievements in 2025 included:

Solidaridad supported smallholder leaders to speak directly to decision-makers. For instance, Pedro Seijas from Peru addressed the global RSPO conference regarding the failure of credit markets and the need to shift from merely implementing sustainability to enabling farmers to make a living from it.

We launched the "Solidaridad for Sustainable Asia" YouTube channel, which amassed over 15,000 subscribers in just six months.

Through articles in the media, we reached a potential audience of 2 billion.

In Uganda, we launched a highly impactful radio and media campaign focused on responsible artisanal mining and child protection. By partnering with local mining associations, the campaign reached an estimated 500,000 people to raise awareness about the dangers of mercury exposure and advocate for keeping children in school.

In Europe, we drove powerful public campaigns that successfully pressured major Dutch supermarkets—such as Albert Heijn and PLUS—to publicly pledge living income strategies for cocoa farmers.

The 2025 Cocoa Barometer, the Palm Oil Barometer and the Cotton Rankings collectively reached hundreds of millions of readers and shifted media discourse toward smallholder inclusivity.

East and Central Africa's Managing Director received the Woman on Board Award and earned a nomination for the 2025 NGO Awards in the 'Best in Agriculture' category.

The cocoa beans from the Tuerê program in the Brazilian Amazon secured almost 40 national and international awards, including a silver medal at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris.

The Peruvian documentary film "Entre Polvo y Sueños" (Between Dust and Dreams), which chronicles the reality of female miners, won an Outstanding Excellence award at the DocuVision International Film Festival.

A multichannel campaign was developed to strengthen producers' feedback in a qualitative impact assessment of the Colombian oil palm supply chain. The study's online launch event became Solidaridad Latin America's most-watched video to date, with more than 98,000 views on YouTube.

We actively campaigned in and around COP30 in Brazil, highlighting a decade of climate-smart agriculture and forest restoration in the Brazilian Amazon.

Solidaridad attended, organized and featured in numerous high-profile international events, summits and conferences in 2025. We directly engaged thousands of stakeholders by speaking at major international forums, including the Africa ESG Summit, the RSPO conference in Kuala Lumpur, the Africa Food Systems Summit, Amsterdam Cocoa Week, and COP30.

Focusing on measuring what matters

In 2025, Solidaridad made a deliberate choice to become more impact-oriented. To measure our impact across all our programmes, we developed our 8 global Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) aligned with the new Multi-annual Strategic Plan (2026-2030). These KPIs follow a value framework approach, which allows us to move away from simply counting things towards measuring what matters. These globally agreed-upon KPIs align with the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, and with globally recognized methodologies such as the Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and the Agricultural Viability Index. They have been developed to work as indices, capturing different dimensions of change.

Advancing learning and digital intelligence

We continued internalizing learning within our project cycle, prioritizing sense-making and pause-and-reflect sessions with internal and external project stakeholders to strengthen adaptive management. This progress included developing a global learning product on Technical Assistance that documents both successes and challenges. We progressed in our move from data to intelligence, investing and refining our digital systems to improve data aggregation and analysis, now incorporating AI-driven data modelling and prediction. We also improved data visualization through global dashboards, enabling reliable, real-time tracking of results. This makes it easier to make fact-based management decisions.

Solidaridad's learning product on technical assistance

Accountability and Evaluation

Over 50 evaluations were conducted globally, including baseline evaluations, mid-term and end-of-project evaluations — all pivotal, either in shaping or adapting project strategies, generating critical insights for adaptive management or in understanding impact. A key milestone was the completion of the end evaluation of our five-year RECLAIM! programme, which assessed the impact of our advocacy and policy-influencing strategy across all regions. A catalogue with case-studies and lessons learned of the RECLAIM! Programme can be found HERE.

Read more about our PMEL approach.