Cocoa Promise in Action
At Cargill Cocoa & Chocolate, we believe that improving the lives of cocoa farmers goes hand-in-hand with our business success – and the success of the sector as a whole. While we are proud of the progress we are making, there is still much to do. To achieve a fully sustainable cocoa sector, we’re going to have to learn faster, try harder, and go further – together.
The Cargill Cocoa Promise is implemented in various ways in our origin countries – Ghana, Cameroon, Brazil, Indonesia and Côte d’Ivoire – matching farmer and community needs and the local circumstances of the sector.
See how we’re already making a concrete impact in our five origin countries.
Women in Cocoa
Women’s economic empowerment is critical to a sustainable cocoa sector, and a cornerstone of the Cargill Cocoa Promise.
Addressing Child Labor
Working towards a transparent cocoa supply chain where no children are subjected to dangerous or forced work on cocoa farms
Case Studies
Building on over a decade of experience in cocoa sustainability to create positive outcomes for farmers and their communities – efficiently and effectively.
Find out more about our approach, the progress we are making and future plans across our five origin countries.
PROSPER Project
Our PROSPER Project with CARE established 29 Village Savings and Loans Associations in Côte d’Ivoire and 108 women’s groups in Ghana. These are a good foundation to continue to extend our impact.
Yet that impact can take time to materialize. The interrelated nature of all the issues involved can hold up progress. For instance, a community’s limited buying power can hold back the development of entrepreneurship and additional income-generating activities. So even when VSLA programs are established, their members may not immediately have a local market for the income-generating activities these programs help launch.
This reinforces the need for a systems approach – one that creates market access and is financially rewarding for communities. We are developing a new model to support women’s groups and alternative income-generating activities so that they become more sustainable. This model will better enable community members to connect to the financing and markets they need, either through cooperatives or other channels.
TRECC “Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities”
Limited access to quality education for children in isolated cocoa communities lacking infrastructure and teachers is increasing the risk of child labor. To face this challenge, Cargill together with the Jacobs Foundation designed an innovative solution as part of the TRECC “Transforming Education in Cocoa Communities” Program.
The solution consists of creating multi-grade classrooms for out-of-school children selected from Cargill’s Child Labor and Monitoring Remediation Systems to learn at their respective grade levels using an engaging and innovative technology-based learning tool that tracks their progress.
The innovative approach developed by TIDE, an India-based social enterprise, and co-implemented with the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), has enabled 150 children in five communities to attend lessons developed in alignment with the Ministry of Education of Côte d’Ivoire. Multi-grade classes have proven to be effective in reducing the need of infrastructure, materials and personnel. A few months after starting lessons, the children showed rapid progress, knowing already how to read, write, and count.
Supply Chain innovation in Côte d’Ivoire
Setting up our Cooperative Management System in Côte d’Ivoire has only reinforced that the strong commitment of supply chain partners, such as farmer organization leaders, is essential for our traceability programs to work.
Digitizing the large and fragmented amount of data needed to create traceability in our supply chain can be a challenge. Cooperative leaders are our true partners in this process and have the strongest ability to drive adoption and ensure data quality.
Because we know that a one-size-fits-all model will not work, we are also using tailored software solutions to meet the needs of specific regions and stakeholders. Meanwhile, we are developing a platform that integrates all of our sustainability data from different sources, in order to get a comprehensive, global view of the impact of our sustainability programs. In total, we are investing more than $2 million this year in our technology roadmap to achieve these outcomes.