This year’s pruning season under the Nestlé Income Accelerator Program in Ghana is seeing something new: women stepping into roles traditionally held by men.
Two pruning groups from the community of Fumso Ketewa are leading the way. Each group has 10 members, including three women challenging long-standing gender roles.
Three work alongside their husbands in the same pruning teams, and the other three have received strong support from home to take part. For all of them, pruning isn’t just a job, it is part of a shared responsibility to increase yields and incomes.
“We prune alongside the men,” says one of the women, “For mature farms with particularly large, heavy branches, the men handle those sections, and we do the rest. It’s a collaborative approach, where responsibilities are divided based on strength and experience not gender.” Payments are shared equally, so even couples in the same pruning group receive their digital payments separately in order to ensure women’s economic autonomy.
Juggling farm work and home life takes planning, but the women are managing to balance their work and childcare responsibilities: “We start pruning at 7:30 a.m. after the children have gone to school. We finish by 4:00 p.m., which means we can be home in time for the children coming back.” For them, joining the pruning teams fits into their daily routines as caregivers and farmers.
The women are not new to the benefits of pruning. Last year, they volunteered their own farms for the campaign and saw firsthand how pruning improved the productivity of their cocoa trees. That experience motivated them to be trained and take a more active role this season—not just as farm owners but as trained workers providing pruning services within their communities.
At Beyond Beans, we’re proud to support this as it becomes more than just better farming techniques—it’s about creating a space for women to be fully involved in the work that helps to sustain their livelihoods and families.
This is a great step forward. The Income Accelerator Program is all about supporting households, and when women get involved, it really brings the message of teamwork and shared responsibility to life.”
Delight Komal Tendeku – Project Manager, Ghana
The presence of women in these groups is already having ripple effects. It’s challenging outdated ideas about what women can do, strengthening family partnerships, and showing the next generation that good cocoa production is a shared endeavour.
For more on our work on Nestlé’s Income Accelerator project, click here.