Sustainable Fine Flavor Cocoa Program Papua New Guinea

Cocoa farmers from Papua New Guinea are provided with suitable training in agricultural, environmental and social topics. In order to improve their livelihoods, agricultural and community development is fostered (program ongoing).

Sustainable Fine Flavor Cocoa Program Madagascar

Smallholder cocoa farmers in Madagascar receive much needed capacity building in good agricultural, social and environmental farming practices. A needs assessment further paved the way for future support in agricultural and community development. Besides the program for sustainable fine flavor cocoa, the Lindt Cocoa Foundation supports the development and implementation of a multi-actor landscape project in the Sambirano valley (program ongoing).*

Sustainable Fine Flavor Cocoa Program Ecuador

Fine flavor cocoa farmers of selected provinces in Ecuador are provided with suitable training in agricultural, environmental and social topics, as well as access to farm investments necessary for a professional cocoa farm management. The two projects started with a pilot year in 2015 (project ongoing).

Sustainable Cocoa Program Ghana

Cocoa farmers from Ghana and Côte d‘Ivoire are provided with suitable training and coaching in agricultural, environmental and social topics. In order to improve their livelihoods, agricultural and community development is fostered. Additionally, elements like alternative income generation activities, farmer business school trainings, or farmer-led nurseries are implemented (program ongoing).

Kakum Sustainable Landscape Project to develop local governance structures

The goal of this project is to transform the Kakum Landscape to a more sustainable and climate-smart cocoa production region and to protect the forests and biodiversity, reduce carbon emissions, and enhance farmers’ and communities’ well-being and resilience to climate change. NCRC is developing a landscape governance system and multi-stakeholder consortium to create an enabling environment in which farmers and farming communities across the landscape can collectively address the environmental and socio-economic issues together with private sector and government actors (project ongoing).*

Improving Biodiversity Outcomes in West African Cocoa - Ghana

This three-year project aims to assess current biodiversity, identify key local and landscape level features that benefit biodiversity, and identify high-priority areas for sustainability interventions, such as cocoa agroforestry, to maximize benefits for birddiversity. The project will also lay the groundwork for long-term monitoring by identifying indicator species and testing cost-effective monitoring methods. It builds on the project "Methods for remotely estimating shade-tree cover and carbon stocks, where two machine-learning models were developed to develop regional maps of shade-tree cover and carbon stocks in cocoa farms (project ongoing).*

Methods for remotely estimating shade-tree cover and carbon stocks

Agroforestry is increasingly promoted in the cocoa sector and can increase the sustainability of cocoa production by supporting high levels of biodiversity, buffering cocoa from climate changes, mitigating future climate change through carbon sequestration. However, there is limited information on current levels of shade-tree cover and carbon stocks in individual farms and across entire regions, and the lack of an efficient, cost-effective tool to monitor progress on their agroforestry initiatives and commitments. Using primary data collection combined with state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence, this project aims to develop methods for remotely estimating shade-tree cover and carbon stocks, and for developing spatially explicit recommendations for cocoa agroforests (project finished).

Adapting and Testing an Approach for Monitoring & Evaluating Climate Smart Cocoa CREMAs in Ghana

The Nature Conservation Research Centre (NCRC) is implementing a project in the Kakum HIA landscape, in the Central Region of Ghana to develop and test an M&E system that can be applied across these types of landscapes. In developing the system, NCRC will adapt and test a socio-economic and ecological M&E approach that it has been using in a mature CREMAs in northern Ghana, and combine it with research methods NCRC has used in cocoa and oil palm systems over the past five years for the purpose of monitoring climate-smart cocoa CREMAs in HIAs in the cocoa landscape (project finished).

Living Income Benchmark for cocoa growing regions of Ghana

This project intended to develop a living income benchmark for cocoa growing regions of Ghana and to contribute to the learning of the relevance and methodology for the concept of ‘living income’ for smallholder farming systems (project finished).

Child Labour Proxy Risk Indicator

The research project of the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) identified which factors make children, households and communities vulnerable to child labor. Based on these findings, a community scoring system was developed to measure a community’s level of protection to children’s non-engagement in child labor (project finished).

Demystifying the cocoa sector: Uncover the realities of cocoa growing households

The study of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) tried to uncover more background information about cocoa growing households in order to develop scenarios with projections about the future population of ‘cocoa farmers’. Based on the findings, interventions to ensure future cocoa supply and better livelihoods for households involved in cocoa production are recommended (project finished). Read More

Inclusive Partnerships and Innovation Platforms for Sustainable Tree Crops

This multi-year research project - taking place in Ghana and South Africa - was an innovative combination of value chain and livelihood trajectory analysis, action research in learning platforms, and a landscape approach. It seeks to broaden the innovation space in value chain collaborations and enhance their capacity to provide food secure, equitable and sustainable solutions for smallholders. The Lindt Cocoa Foundation co-funds the research in Ghana (project finished).

Training for Agricultural Finance Professionals

Five staff members of the Farmers Support Company, the leading microfinance institution set up by the Government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, have been trained in agricultural value chain financing. The results of this initial training not only builds both staff and institutional capacity, but also pioneers a microfinance lending model that will serve the needs of local cocoa farmers by filling a vital gap to access financing options (project finished).

Researching the potential and actual Impact of increased cocoa production on the labor market and child labor – Ghana & Côte d'Ivoire

The research study of the International Cocoa Initiative had the objective to unveil the interlinkages between productivity gains of cocoa farmers, labor availability and demand; and child labor risks in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire (project finished). Read More