Growing Household Incomes Together

Progress Blog

Cocoa Life is celebrating 10 years of lifting up cocoa communities and shaping the landscapes where cocoa grows. 10 years of working on-the-ground with partners, and the women & men who grow cocoa to help everyone benefit from the bean that becomes the chocolate we love. 10 years of innovating and taking what works to scale so we can move cocoa forward together. To celebrate this milestone, we have launched a series of stories featuring our partners that demonstrates our progress and impact to date.

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Farmer poverty remains one of the most prominent and complex challenges faced by cocoa communities across the world. We believe that securing a Living Income — an income that enables a decent standard of living for all members of a household — is a critical enabler to building a sustainable livelihood and tackling this challenge. That’s why developing approaches to strengthen the income portfolio of cocoa farming households has been a priority for our program from day one. These approaches include good agricultural practices (GAP) trainings to improve yields and income from cocoa, training on additional income-generating opportunities, the loyalty premium, training on business management, and access to finance. To learn more about how we have been moving cocoa forward together over the past ten years, you can find the full series here.

"It´s important that farmers look beyond cocoa-related income because there are several other factors that enable them to improve their income. For example, the number of breadwinners in the house, the number of income streams that they have. And these are all part of the programs that we implement with the cocoa farmers to help them improve their incomes."

Yaa Peprah Amekudzi, Head of Cocoa Life Ghana, Mondelēz International