Community Wellbeing
We are creating stronger, more resilient cocoa farming communities by investing in the wellbeing of farming families.
The context
Most of the world’s cocoa is grown by smallholder farmers who earn the majority of their living from growing and selling cocoa beans. However, cocoa alone is rarely sufficient to generate a living income for these farmers or to support their wider families and communities. To ensure the wellbeing and resilience of cocoa farming communities, Cargill Cocoa & Chocolate focuses on enabling additional income-generating activities, establishing and maintaining an ecosystem of social services, and providing information on how to improve overall wellbeing.
Providing farm workers with healthcare services, educating the next generation of farmers to a high standard, working to identify and prevent child labor, and giving women more access to economic opportunities are all vital for strengthening the socio-economic resilience of cocoa farmers, families and communities. Such interventions also improve farm productivity, helping to secure cocoa supplies for generations to come.
Our target
One million families benefiting from the services of the Cargill Cocoa Promise by 2030
Our Community Wellbeing Strategic Action Plan provides a roadmap towards achieving our goal of stronger, more resilient cocoa farming communities.
How are we achieving our goal?
Together with our partners, we are implementing community-driven initiatives to help prevent child labor while also enhancing women’s economic opportunities, increasing access to education, and improving health and nutrition. To this end, we work with local leaders to conduct Community Needs Assessments (CNAs) and then develop tailored Community Action Plans (CAPs) to accelerate community wellbeing.
Our efforts focus on implementing context-specific programs in the following areas:
Protecting children
Through the Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation System, we work to raise awareness about the impact of child labor, identify incidents within the supply chain, and implement remediation activities such as providing access to birth certificates, school kits and community schools, as well as strengthening school management and establishing child protection committees.
Economic opportunities for women
We work to upskill women in cocoa communities via functional and financial literacy training and entrepreneurship trainings. This has a positive ripple effect, since women tend to reinvest any earnings into their families and communities. We also provide access to wider economic opportunities through Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs) and business development, in partnership with IDH, Advans and CARE.
Training and entrepreneurship for youth
We foster capacity building and entrepreneurship to support youth at risk of child labor, by helping them develop technical, business and life skills.
Health, nutrition and food security
We deliver nutrition programs to improve diets and nutrition, while our trainings are focused on helping communities get the most from their crops. We also help communities to access clean water and sanitation facilities.
Our results
- We have launched CLMRS in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Indonesia and we are conducting child labor risk assessments in Brazil.
- 53 cooperatives have been monitored, with more than 3,469 children in the process of receiving remediation activities.
- In partnership with CARE, we have established 29 VSLAs in Côte d’Ivoire and 108 women’s groups in Ghana, benefitting over 4,000 people.
- More than 175,000 farmers in the five countries from which we directly source cocoa took part in gender sensitization trainings through Farmer Field Schools and Farmer Training Days.
- FarmForce, Cargill’s innovative mobile application used for GPS polygon farm mapping, cooperative management system (CMS) and traceability, was deployed to reach over 1,200 cooperative leaders and lead farmers in Côte d’Ivoire to raise local awareness on COVID-19, to sensitize on recommended WASH and sanitary practices and to relay the message to farmers and local communities.