The Comfandi Family Compensation Fund joined Business Call to Action (BCtA) in July 2019 with a commitment to provide affordable essential services to low-income Colombians, integrating 200 additional farmers in its value chain through an agreement to buy their produce to sell in their supermarkets, and strengthening a total of eight farmer associations through training and development by 2020.

Established in 1957, Comfandi is a Compensation Fund in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, which offers various services to low-income people at affordable prices, from medical care, subsidies, supermarkets to financial services. Approximately 80 percent of its customers live at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Under its financial services, Comfandi offers housing and credit subsidies with attractive rates, which means that those who cannot access these services in traditional markets now have the opportunity to do so. In addition, they have established supermarkets, drug stores and health care services where people can access basic products at competitive prices. In their Fruver supermarkets, they also actively seek to obtain their products and goods through small producers and local suppliers. Finally, Comfandi also offers cultural and professional development services, such as sports, recreation, education and business training through the associations it supports.

In terms of income, Comfandi is the fourth largest family compensation fund in the country and a leader in southwest Colombia. It covers 57 percent of the 42 municipalities of Valle del Cauca. It has 44,665 affiliated companies of various sectors and sizes, and supports 1,360,700 low-income people in the region.

Over the past four years, Comfandi has worked through local associations to help eliminate middlemen for small producers and rural entrepreneurs when it comes to selling their products, which means they have more profit from their sales. These farmers and entrepreneurs usually belong to minority groups, such as indigenous people or those of African descent, who are in hard-to-reach areas or in areas of armed conflict, which increases the difficulty in bringing their products to market. To address this, Comfandi has worked to strengthen these farmers’ skills by providing training in production, logistics and administrative matters.

Comfandi’s support to rural associations aims to strengthen their production, banking and marketing processes. They provide technical support we provide through partners such as the National Association of Industries and the National Association of Guilds.

The new associations will also receive technical and commercial support, to identify buyers who are willing to purchase their products under the same conditions. Comfandi also helps association members to certify their products under sanitary and organic parameters so that they can obtain the sustainability seal and can export to other countries their crops.

About Comfandi:  Comfandi is the Family Welfare Fund (FWF) of the Department of Valle del Cauca located in the pacific, a not-for profit private entity with the purpose of improving the living conditions of the population, helping in the human, family and labor development of workers and their families, contributing to the construction of equity and the processes of strengthening human rights in the country.