As countries and companies prepare for the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the need for practical support goes beyond traceability and legal compliance. Ensuring that transitions to deforestation-free production are fair, inclusive and viable for the diversity of actors involved – particularly smallholders – is essential.
SAFE, in partnership with CIFOR-ICRAF, has developed a comprehensive
It supports practitioners and programme teams working with producers and value-chain actors.
Moving beyond compliance
Women produce a significant share of the world’s food yet face systemic barriers to land, finance, and decision-making. Indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups, despite their key roles in food production and land stewardship, often lack formal land rights and may face conflicts from large-scale agricultural or extractive projects.
The GESI+ toolkit positions inclusion and intersectionality as core elements of sustainable and deforestation-free value chains. As EUDR operationalisation accelerates, upstream actors – particularly smallholders – face growing expectations related to traceability, legality and due diligence.
Supporting smallholders in their diversity requires approaches that recognise unequal starting points and differentiated capacities. The toolkit provides practical methods to identify risks of exclusion, strengthen participation and promote fairer benefit-sharing across value chains. Using an intersectional lens, considering factors like gender, age, ethnicity, indigeneity and tenure status, it helps ensure that emerging market requirements do not unintentionally disadvantage vulnerable groups.
By strengthening the social dimension of EUDR operationalisation, the training protects livelihoods, supports resource rights and promotes more equitable participation in deforestation-free value chains.
Co-created and tested across three countries
The materials were developed through a collaborative, iterative process with partners and practitioners. Training pilots in Brazil, Ecuador and Indonesia in 2025, brought together representatives from government, civil society and the private sector. Feedback from these workshops informed the final design, ensuring relevance across different institutional and production contexts.
The workstream produced a global information brief and country-level assessments analysing value-chain dynamics, relevant national legislation and social safeguards for different identity groups in producing landscapes.
Discover how the ToT was tested in Brazil, Ecuador, and Indonesia, bringing together government, civil society, and private sector actors. 
Watch the video with impressions from the pilot in Indonesia:
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More InformationBuilt for practitioners working closest to producers
The facilitation toolkit is designed for trainers working directly with smallholder producers, small-scale value-chain actors, Indigenous peoples and local communities. These actors often serve as the bridge between operators, traders and producers in sourcing areas.
Rather than prescribing a fixed curriculum, the toolkit supports flexible adaptation to local contexts. It enables trainers to develop their own learning plans based on commodity, geography and institutional needs.
The final ToT Facilitation Toolkit is structured around:
- 10 learning modules, organised into four learning units;
- 24 practical facilitation tools, from participatory exercises and value chain mapping to risk analysis and action-planning;
- A step-by-step process supporting trainers to develop their own context-specific learning plans; and
- evaluation tools for real-time and post-training feedback from participants.
The toolkit was presented during the Zero Deforestation Hub’s Learning Series in December 2025. A recording of the webinar is available: Zero Deforestation Learning Series on Gender Equity and Social Inclusion auf Vimeo
Discover supporting materials:
👉 Read the Global Info Brief
👉 Read the Country Case Indonesia
👉 Read the Country Case Ecuador
👉 Read the article about the pilot in Brazil
👉 Read the ForestNews article about the process
