Country: Côte d’Ivoire
Our cocoa juice project is working to turn the juice from the cocoa fruit into a commercially viable product that can help rural farming communities generate an additional income stream. The project is already raising farmers’ incomes by 10%, with potential to reach 30% once the project is fully upscaled.
A typical cocoa growing household in Ghana earns just USD 2,290 per year, yet KIT Royal Tropical Institute estimates the Living Income Benchmark – a minimum income for a decent standard of living – to be around USD 4,742 per household per year, implying a gap of around USD 2,450 per year.
With the launch of the Kumasi Drinks, a Dutch social enterprise that is at the heart of this project, we plan to sell 12,000 litres in 2021, growing to 240,000 by 2025. This comes to a total of circa 250,000 USD of extra revenues to our farmer households per year.
Throughout the project, we empower women to become collectors, processors and marketers of this new cocoa juice. This encourages women to take on leading, paid roles, generating independent income that also increases their decision-making power over household finances.
Together with international non-profit Solidaridad, we are exploring this co-ownership model, through which women farmer groups would gain shareholder status, thus sharing in the company’s profits as it scales and benefitting from the profit of the beverage itself.
Partners:
