In April 2013, we made commitments to promote women's empowerment by extending our reporting on gender rights in cocoa farming, ensuring a consistent approach to gender programs in key cocoa origin markets and advocating for industrywide action.

Now, we are publishing third-party impact assessments studying the status of women in our cocoa supply chain in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. The reports, by Michael J. Hiscox and Rebecca Goldstein of Harvard University, for Ghana, and CARE International, for Cote d'Ivoire, are included as PDFs under Latest News on the right of this page.

In our action plan also issued here, we share Cocoa Life's proposals to incorporate learnings from these assessments into our existing work to address gender in our programs in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire.

Beyond this, we continue to use our leading role in the cocoa sector to advocate for women's empowerment through our engagement with key multi-stakeholder initiatives and with public and civil society institutions. For example, we have been active in sharing our gender and community empowerment work with the World Cocoa Foundation to help incorporate gender equality into sector-wide principles for cocoa sustainability.