Launched by the Swiss Investment Fund for Emerging Markets (SIFEM)’s Technical Assistance Facility (TAF), the Skills for Employment Excellence and Impact (SEE Impact) Award recognizes and co-finances impactful, innovative, and scalable projects from underlying portfolio companies of SIFEM partner funds and financial institutions that enhance workforce skills, employability, and employment quality. The award aims to empower businesses to become exemplary employers while driving sustainable development.
The 2025 edition of the Award attracted 34 applicants across three Award tiers: Pioneer, Catalyst, and Game Changer, with each bringing forward innovative proposals.
In this blog post, we’re presenting two finalists in the Catalyst tier that have each developed highly impactful projects to advance workforce skills, employability, and employment quality.
Kar.ma Coffee
Kar.ma Village Sourcing: Women and youth-led ethical coffee and value chain innovation in rural Nepal
Kar.ma Coffee (“Kar.ma”) is a Kathmandu-based for-profit social enterprise reshaping how the world experiences coffee—with purpose and impact. Beyond being a café, Kar.ma connects over 1,100 smallholder farmers through fair, transparent, and regenerative sourcing, empowering rural livelihoods and protecting Nepal’s fragile ecosystems. Every cup tells a story of dignity, inclusion, and mindful living. Through its sister initiative, Kar.ma Handmade, the brand transforms coffee waste into artisanal goods, sustaining local craftsmanship and promoting circular design. By linking farm, cup, and craft, Kar.ma creates meaningful employment, fosters green skills, and promotes sustainable economic growth across rural and urban Nepal. Transparent, scalable, and deeply human—Kar.ma proves that conscious choices can transform communities and strengthen the workforce, one cup at a time.
Photo credit: Saurabh Majhi
Kar.ma is a loan client of Global IME Bank—a SIFEM partner financial institution in Nepal since 2024, and has had over 12 years of direct engagement with smallholder farmers in Nepal’s remote hillsides. Coffee farmers in those regions often earn less than USD 1 a day, not because their crops lack quality but because they face systemic barriers to success. Low yields, outdated farming methods, and limited access to modern tools and quality training have kept productivity and incomes stagnant.
The broader ripple effect of this is seen in the form of heightened youth migration abroad given lack of meaningful opportunities at home, continued sidelining of women from coffee value chain which could be a source of good and stable income, and ethical coffee buyers struggling to source coffee from these regions in a transparent and inclusive manner. At its core, this is a skills challenge.
In response to this, Kar.ma Coffee’s Village Sourcing project seeks to bridge this gap by equipping “Coffee Ambassador” farmers—especially women and youth—with hands-on training in modern cultivation, business practices, and digital literacy. The initiative introduces a tech-enabled platform for full traceability, transparent payments, and direct market access, ensuring that growers are empowered, visible, and compensated fairly. With village-based delivery, interactive learnings, and local language support built-in into the project design, it seems to ensure accessibility and community ownership.
Photo credit: Saurabh Majhi
By 2027, the project aims to enable 250 farmers to increase income and satisfaction, with 40% female participation and a 50% increase in coffee harvest and household incomes among participants, with at least 60% of youth Coffee Ambassadors expected to continue in sourcing or digital facilitation roles.
By blending skills enhancement, transparency, equity, and technology, Kar.ma Village Sourcing project seeks to help build an ethical, inclusive, and future-ready coffee value chain in Nepal—potentially catalysing similar initiatives in other value chains in the country and beyond.
Sid’s Farm
Rural Skill Enhancement for Mastitis Prevention and Cure
Sid’s Farm began in 2013 with a simple conviction: truly safe dairy should be a norm, not an exception. The company started its journey quietly, testing for safety in milk every single day and by building a transparent, direct-to-consumer ecosystem from the ground up. Its mission is anchored in building a sustainable and well-informed ecosystem of dairy farmers while making sure that safety standards, cattle care, and good dairy practices are never compromised upon.
Sid’s Farm is a portfolio company of Omnivore, an India-based VC firm. SIFEM committed USD 15 million in 2022 to Omnivore’s third fund, The Omnivore Agritech & Climate Sustainability Fund. Omnivore supports visionary founders creating impact at scale across India by advancing food security, agricultural prosperity, resource efficiency, and rural resilience.
Photo credit: Sid’s Farm
Sid’s Farm partners with farmers, providing essential training, veterinary care, and financial support along with a transparent value chain. This model allows Sid’s Farm to uphold its promise of purity, with every product rigorously tested. From just 20 cows to serving over 50,000 families, its successes are built on the unwavering trust placed in them by their customers and the farmers they work with, not to mention their team’s tireless dedication to bringing safe, honest dairy to every Indian household.
Recognizing the acute shortage of veterinarians in India, Sid’s Farm has proposed a scalable solution to one of the most persistent challenges in the dairy sector: mastitis, a prevalent but often underdiagnosed disease that erodes milk yields and farmer incomes.
In rural India, smallholder farmers, including many from marginalized communities, depend on dairy for their livelihoods, yet lack timely access to veterinary care. The project proposed by Sid’s Farm for the Catalyst tier of the SEE Impact Award seek to address this gap by upskilling rural youth and women as paravets, equipping them with hands-on training in mastitis detection, digital tools, and standardized protocols. Through a blend of classroom and field-based learning, paravets and farmers learn to use California Mastitis Test (CMT) kits, LFA strips, and a tech-enabled Farmer Management System (FMS) for real-time diagnosis and reporting.
Photo credit: Sid’s Farm
The project operates through village clusters, with local agents coordinating baseline data collection, training, and ongoing support. Paravets and farmers participate in workshops, hands-on demonstrations, and peer mentoring, with all diagnostic and treatment actions logged in the FMS. Monthly reviews and feedback loops drive continuous improvement, while digital tools enable targeted, data-driven interventions.
The project aims to reduce mastitis incidence is Sid’s Farm’s ecosystem from 60% to below 30%, increase CMT kit usage from 10-20% to over 80% and boost diagnostic and treatment entries in FMS from 1% to over 95% percent. Healthier herds mean higher milk yields, lower treatment costs, and improved household incomes for smallholder farmers. Furthermore, by promoting targeted treatments and reducing misuse, the project enhances milk safety and aligns with national guidelines for responsible antibiotic use.
The project’s approach of blending low-cost diagnostic tools with digital innovation has the possibility to make it highly scalable and replicable across farms, potentially setting a good example for community-led animal healthcare with tangible benefits in the form of improved rural livelihoods and economic resilience.
Value of the Chain: Collective action for shared prosperity
The Catalyst tier finalists Kar.ma Coffee and Sid’s Farm’s proposed projects aim to demonstrate that when enterprises invest in skills, technology, and inclusive support, they not only strengthen their own value chains but also help transform the prospects of entire communities.
SIFEM’s SEE Impact Award celebrates these efforts, recognizing that real progress is driven by practical solutions, local leadership, and a commitment to shared prosperity.
Stay tuned: The winners of the SEE Impact Award 2025, including for the Catalyst tier, will be announced on November 5, 2025. For any questions, please reach out to the organizing team at SEEImpactAward@responsAbility.com.