Case Study: Partners of the Americas achieves sustainable cacao farm management with Smartsheet

Partners of the Americas helps Colombian cacao farmers manage and grow their businesses sustainably

Partners of the Americas, a nonprofit implementing the USDA Food for Progress Cacao for Development project in Colombia, needed a better way to help thousands of farmers manage cacao and complementary crops sustainably. The challenge was coordinating remote farm activities, tracking progress, and supporting a complex program with 5,500 beneficiaries, many farm visits, and multiple data sources. Smartsheet was used to build the project’s planning and monitoring tools, including the Cacaogramas for farmers.

Smartsheet helped Partners of the Americas create circular Gantt charts, integrate offline data capture through KoBoToolbox, and centralize reporting in Microsoft Power BI. The platform also supports monitoring and evaluation, RFP review, employee onboarding, and consultant assessment, giving the team an auditable workflow and a single view of the project. As a result, farmers can better manage their work, Partners can oversee more than 25,000 annual farm visits, and the organization can run a highly complex, multi-country program more effectively.

Partners of the Americas

Pablo Ramirez

Chief of Party