Steve Burgoon, our U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, gives us a glimpse inside an ICT-supported Community Resource Center as well as the community in Sefwi-Nkonya, Western Region, Ghana.

Entry: Aisha Hassan, World Cocoa Foundation

As the newest member of the WCF ECHOES DC Team, I manage WCF educational programs in West Africa from a bird’s eye perspective. Like many Americans, when I joined WCF, I had only a cursory knowledge of where my chocolate comes from. I understood the basics: chocolate is derived from a cocoa plant - undergoes cultivation and processing – is mixed with other ingredients to create the sweet treats available at my local grocery store. I never once considered the human side of chocolate – The Farmer and the Cocoa Farming Community at large.

WCF’s three P’s: People, Profit, Plant was an instrumental in helping me to see the chocolate, better yet, the cocoa, as a source of livelihood and survival for so many people living in rural West Africa.

People: WCF ECHOES works tirelessly towards the goal of improving the quality and access to education in rural cocoa-growing communities. These activities empower the farmer, their family and ultimately the entire community with the capacity to better understand and address the challenges of maintaining a sustainable viable crop.

Planet: Dependent on the land, the cocoa-growing farmer is often at the mercy of forces beyond his/her control. Training on and promoting environmentally friendly farming and cultivation practices is not only economically beneficial to the farmer it helps to ensure longevity of the crops for generations to come.

Profit: The cocoa tree is a cash crop that is a key component of the economic stability of rural West African communities. Educating and training the farmers on everything from basic literacy to production practices is integral in working towards improved and more equitable returns for the farmer. This in turn strengthens the entire Cocoa Industry and keeps our chocolate addiction prices down.

Now equipped with a robust understanding of the 3 P’s, I am able to more effectively drive home the WCF mission to promote a sustainable cocoa economy through economic and social development and environmental stewardship in cocoa-growing communities; when working with our myriad of Corporate and Industry Partners. This knowledge has reinforced and reinvigorated my commitment to education, in addition to the innovative projects I am fortunate to be involved with through the World Cocoa Foundation.

Entry: Marisa Yoneyama, World Cocoa Foundation

As we approach Valentine’s Day, a holiday traditionally tied to the gift of chocolate, let’s think about where cocoa comes from and how it travels on its complex journey from farms to consumers. Globally, there are over five million independent cocoa farmers in Africa, the Americas, and Southeast Asia. Farmers grow cocoa trees on small farms in hot, rainy environments, mostly in areas near the equator. Cocoa is a delicate and sensitive crop, and farmers must look after the trees, making sure the trees are protected from the wind and sun. Most cocoa trees begin to bear fruit in the fifth year. In the U.S. alone, over 68,000 jobs are directly involved in the manufacture of confectionery and chocolate products. When the distribution and sale of these products is taken into consideration, the employment effect triples.

Challenges in the agriculture sector such as the worst child labor abuses, climate change, and farmer productivity need a variety of committed stakeholders who empower farmers and build up communities. This means bringing together farmer organizations, industry, governments, academia, consumers, media, and non-governmental organizations to work together. There is no single, simple solution to address the wide range of challenges and issues in this complex chain.

The media and other advocacy groups play an important role in bringing to light the challenges in the cocoa sector in social and environmental areas.

We recognize the need and the benefit of supporting access to education and training. In rural areas where schools do not exist, we work toward creating partnerships that will see those schools built and run effectively. In remote communities were farmers are using traditional, perhaps outdated, methods of farming that produce low yields, we create partnerships that train farmers with new methods of caring for their farms, provide them with improved planting material, and make educational opportunities available so they can be effective in the marketplace. Our hope is that educated children will grow into responsible adults who will continue to drive positive change and growth in their communities. And our hope is that adults will lift up their communities through their successes and be empowered to support their children to do the same.

We believe that child labor is usually a symptom of wider problems, including poverty. WCF programs expand educational opportunities for youth, provide basic literacy training, agricultural knowledge, leadership skills, and vocational education. We believe helping the entire farm family will improve conditions for the children. Through our training programs, we educate adult farmers, youth and children about appropriate and inappropriate activities for children helping on the family farm.

To provide context for impact and results through these programs, to date, WCF has reached over 480,000 cocoa farmers worldwide through training and education, and we have reached over 380,000 students through direct literacy and agricultural training as well as training of teachers and administrators. As of last year, farmers who completed WCF training programs reported a 75% increase in yields in Ghana and a 70% increase in yields in Côte d’Ivoire, over the year prior.

There has been much progress made and successes we have witnessed through our programs. There have also been challenges along the way and many lessons that we have learned. There is a long road ahead of us – we don’t kid ourselves by thinking that a single solution or entity can solve the issues of over five million independent cocoa farmers around the world. We are on the ground in these communities and can see for ourselves what issues farmers and their families face – and how we can help.

We encourage you to visit the WCF website to learn more about cocoa and how you can get involved.

Originally published on Impatient Optimists, blog of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

My job is to learn about global health and development—and to travel to poor countries to meet farmers who can’t grow enough food, mothers who can’t keep children healthy, and heroes in the field who are doing something about those emergencies. Very few people can devote the time to really understand these complex problems. Even fewer can actually meet the people who are struggling to overcome them. That is why I write an annual letter every year.

I want people to know about the amazing progress we’ve made. I also want them to see how much more progress it will take before we live in a truly equitable world.

In this year’s letter, I focus on food and agriculture (though I also provide updates about all the global health and U.S. education work we do). When I was in high school, a popular book called The Population Bomb painted a nightmarish vision of mass starvation on a planet that has outgrown its carrying capacity. That prediction was wrong, in large part because researchers developed much more productive seeds and other tools that helped poor farmers in many parts of the world multiply their yields. As a result, the percentage of people in extreme poverty has been cut in half in my lifetime. That’s the amazing progress part of the story, and not enough people know it.

But there’s the progress-yet-to-come part, and people need to know that, too. There are still more than 1 billion people who live in extreme poverty. They are located primarily in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and they live on the edge of starvation. There is an irony in this, because most of them are farmers. We can help these 1 billion achieve self-sufficiency, just like we helped billions before them, but we stopped trying. At a certain point, the sense of crisis around food dissipated, and the proportion of foreign aid dedicated to agriculture dropped from one-fifth to less than one-twentieth.

My hope for my annual letter is that it helps people connect to the choice we all have to make. Relatively small investments changed the future for hundreds of millions of small farm families. The choice now is this: Do we continue those investments so that the 1 billion people who remain poor benefit? Or do we tolerate a world in which one in seven people is undernourished, stunted, and in danger of starving to death?

In times of tight budgets, we have to pick our priorities. It’s clear that in this particular time, we’re in danger of deciding that aid to the poorest is not one of them. I am confident, however, that if people understand what their aid has already accomplished—and its potential to accomplish so much more—they’ll insist on doing more, not less. That is why I wrote my letter. I hope you’ll take the time to read it and share it with your friends and family.

I’ve invited students from around the world to write their own annual letters too. You can send your letter, or any questions you have for me, to annualletter@gatesfoundation.org. I'll be answering and talking about the ideas in your letters in a live webcast on February 2 on my Facebook page.

Entry: Sona Ebai, Senior Technical Advisor for Policy and Governance,
World Cocoa Foundation

I think WCF/ACI is coming on stream at a great time to build on the success of the WCF Cocoa Livelihoods Program (WCF/CLP) and WCF/ECHOES program. Through these efforts, we are beginning to tackle a rural transformation process that is indispensable to the sustainability of the cocoa value chain.

Food security has four dimensions:
- Availability of food
- Access to food
- Safe and healthy utilization of food
- Stability of food availability, access and utilization

Increased farm productivity and efficiency, helping to raise the average of 450kg/Ha today to 1,000kg/Ha would obviously release additional land for food production. Diversification will increase the income and nutritional basket for the farm family while increased direct income from cocoa would increase physical and economic access to food and many other social amenities.

So it is quite easy to demonstrate that cocoa, in the sub-region is key to overall rural transformation because of its impact on land and water use, environmental stewardship, food supply and economic access to food as it generates close to 8 billion dollars of revenue for the West Africa region annually.

WCF/ACI will certify improved cocoa planting material to enable producing countries to raise their output. Creating public-private partnerships will help to introduce favorable policies and to ensure appropriate technology and innovations get to the farmers using market driven systems.

The strongest support will even come from the African Union’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) - Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) which is enabling African countries to target their respective agricultural sectors, set priorities and investment plans by committing at least 10% of their national budgets to agriculture and achieve a 6% sector growth by 2015.

This is a concrete attempt at achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing poverty and hunger by 50%. It centers around the creation of public- private partnerships as a new concept for change that builds on a modern agriculturally-based model of development, allowing for countries to take the lead in addressing a policy gap after over 30 years of structural adjustment in these farm-based economies where agriculture was a low priority for public funding.

WCF/ACI would therefore make a strong contribution as it leverages funds from the public and private sectors to support capacity building, technology and knowledge transfer, sustainable extension services, microfinance, transparency and governance rather than having international effort serving as role substitution for the governments as heretheto was the case.