Blog

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gradually become more prevalent in our daily lives. We ask Siri about the weather or have Chat GPT type our work emails. But what does it take to make all these AI-driven devices work?

Frederik Claasen, the head of policy at our partner organisation Solidaridad Network on the opportunities and obstacles facing smallholder farmers in their data ecosystems.

A blog post on the potential of AR and VR technologies to address global challenges in Agriculture by Dominik Mahr, Full Professor at and head of the MSCM Department, and Noah Moonen, lecturer at MSCM, and DEXLab Manager

You have most likely seen internationally renowned companies' claims stating their products are "carbon neutral" or have heard that you can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without exacerbating the climate crisis. But what are these claims built on?

In this blog, Sustainability Science graduate Marie-Luise Zaiss briefly answers the research question of her master thesis: To what extent do these companies add sustainable value at the farmer level of the Ghanaian cocoa value chain?

Worldwide, millions of people work in clothing, textile and shoe production. The vast majority are not paid enough to meet their basic needs. This needs to change! That is why FSD supports Solidaridad's Good Clothes Fair Pay campaign, a European Citizens’ Initiative for a living wage in the clothing...

External partnerships and Action Research are exceptions rather than rules within university walls. Which in our case raises the question: How did the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics (SBE) spearhead, Fair & Smart Data, come to exist and combine these aspects?

For any food and agriculture supply chain actor with a sustainability target, carbon farming is a promising solution. But supply chain actors are not the first to look at carbon farming to meet these targets. What are the consequences, and how can we tackle them?

Many of us have purchased fair trade products and paid a premium in hopes of improving the lives of farmers in developing countries. But what effect does this premium we pay in the supermarkets have? And how can we evaluate existing or new policies aimed at raising the income and well-being of...

Fair and Smart Data, an SBE Spearhead, was recently invited to join Solidaridad Network, one of their partners, on a field trip to Malawi and Zambia. The goal was to introduce their partners and colleagues to their smallholder farmers-oriented digital projects. In this blog, Sidi Amar reflects on...

FSDGs, a playful contraction of FSD, the Fair & Smart Data spearhead at Maastricht University and the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. What is the relationship between both acronyms, or to put it less ambitious, to which of the SDGs can FSD possibly contribute? Moreover...

Many fair trade labels exist, but do they really work well? Labelling fair products is an easy way to inform consumers without overloading them with information. But it also seems that the success of this strategy is limited. Which raises the main question: what stops consumers from buying fair...

What are companies' voluntary offsetting claims based on? How can we distinguish between good and bad? And what is the role of consumers, whose perceptions are at the core of companies' motivations to offset emissions?
Emma van de Ven, Strategy Lead at ACORN (Rabobank), was interviewed to explain...

This blog is about the GroЯ® trading platform of Vestergaard, a social entrepreneurship company based in Switzerland. Vestergaard is well known for its high-quality mosquito nets distributed to approximately 2 billion people in Africa and Asia. As an FSD team member, I see strong alignment between...

At the beginning of 2021, Rabobank and Microsoft officially announced their decision to join forces to create Rabo Carbon Bank (RCB), an online marketplace for carbon trading (Hoff, 2021). Building on Rabobank's origins as a farmers' bank and Microsoft's position as an IT leader, the Rabo Carbon...