Description

The European Forest Institute’s Global Partnerships serve to advance the protection and sustainable use of forests across the world, including through comprehensive engagement with agricultural value chains in forest-risk regions and sectors. The Technical Facility on Deforestation-Free Value Chains, managed by EFI, provides targeted expertise, tools, and support to help organisations and countries transition towards legal and deforestation-free supply chains. Offering technical assistance and sharing best practices, the Facility empowers stakeholders to meet regulatory requirements such as the European Union’s Regulation on Deforestation-Free Products (EUDR) and to contribute to global objectives on forest conservation.

WHIMO is an open-source, free, and user-friendly digital solution developed by the European Forest Institute to help supply-chain actors record commodity transactions and exchange geolocation data seamlessly along the value chain. WHIMO captures and transfers key traceability information—from farm geodata to collection and delivery records—so that downstream users can confidently link end-market volumes back to their origins. Accessible even in low-infrastructure contexts, WHIMO empowers cooperatives, local aggregators, transporters, processors, and exporters to better understand their supply chains, identify traceability gaps, and collect basic data required for environmental due diligence.

WHIMO will soon be made available to users through the Apple and Google Play stores. Furthermore, the source-code has been published on the EFI GitHub repository and EFI is supporting institutional actors in partner countries – such as the Conseil Interprofessionnel du Cacao et du Café (CICC) in Cameroon and the Liberia Agricultural Commodity Regulatory Authority (LACRA) – to develop their own traceability systems based on the WHIMO source-code. As the Technical Facility continues to deliver the traceability component of its technical assistance programme in producing countries around the world, it is likely that EFI will continue to receive requests from users and institutional partners to resolve bugs, update features or add new ones, and support the creation of national versions in producing countries. EFI is therefore seeking software development services to support the roll-out, ongoing development and management of WHIMO globally over the course of the following three-year period: 2026-2027-2028.