encouraging sustainable, responsible cocoa growing

Entry: Paul Ntim

I would like to share some lessons from a paper I did with other two colleagues, John Ira Kirungi Byaruhanga (Uganda) and Jean-Noel Amantchi Gogoua (Cote d’Ivoire) in Microeconomics Policy course at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University 2007 under the supervision of Professor Geoffrey A. Jehle.

The Paper was titled: Primary school enrolment in Uganda: Implications for poverty reduction. The paper pointed out that potential well-being of Universal Primary Education (UPE) can only be maximized when all children attend school. With poor representation in primary school enrolments, the possibility of reversing the poverty trends in such regions through sector wide programmatic approach like UPE would be greatly undermined. Government should address the causes of poor school enrolment with a view to improving the representation of the affected regions and directly target such regions for special support.

What are the parallel lessons for Ghana in terms of education and poverty reduction especially in the cocoa growing regions/communities? I am convinced that the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) as pertains in Ghana can also be maximized when all children attend school. Regions/communities with poor representation (enrolment pattern) will lag behind other regions/communities in the realization of the full potential impact of FCUBE on human wellbeing indicators and attendant socio-economic development implications.

Government could work hard to address the causes of the poor school enrolment in the affected regions/communities. However, greater results could be attained by directly targeting communities with unique challenges and/or special needs that go beyond FCUBE policy. This would entail allocating proportionately more resources through project-like interventions for activities such as community mobilization; health; population and health knowledge; functional adult literacy programs; and micro credit for income generation at household level. This would also go a long way to arrest poverty, child labour and related problems that Ghana and its development partners are not interested in. This, of course, will call for coordinated efforts from multi-stakeholders including World Cocoa Foundation and its member companies, as well as other development partners to work to improve the welfare of cocoa farming families and their communities including education and health facilities that will attract children to go to school and teachers to stay in such communities.