Fairtrade certifies over 250 cocoa cooperatives in Côte d’Ivoire, comprising over 100,000 farmers and their families. However, management of data about the farmers, their farms, families and cocoa output and earnings is generally poor. This undermines efforts to verify that cooperatives are meeting certification standards and prevents their members from extracting value from their data (for example, to access loans and micro-insurance or to monitor child labour and track forestry protection).
In order to address this gap, in 2019 Fairtrade launched a project to help cocoa cooperatives develop an internal management system for their data which is fit for their needs and which is owned and operated by them. This meant adopting a bottom-up approach, recognising that each cooperative is at a different level of development and has its own set of priorities.
Tedd’s work on the project involved close consultation with Fairtrade and its partners (e.g. FLOCERT, Fairtrade International’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning [MEL] team), carrying out field visits to cooperatives in the Divo and Agboville regions where he met with cooperative heads, délégués and cocoa farmers, and pulling together the findings in a report with a list of key recommendations. Subsequent phases of the project will extend this model to all cooperatives in Fairtrade’s network in Côte d’Ivoire and potentially to all cooperatives in Fairtrade West Africa and other emerging markets (such as Latin America).
Tedd summarised his findings from Phase 1 of the project in an article for GTR (click here to read) and below are some photos and videos of his field research.