“There is a world strategy around protecting forests, but also producing cocoa in a different way, a sustainable way.”
Aminata Bamba Diaby was raised in a farming family. Her parents grew cashew nuts in northeast Ivory Coast. “I’ve been going to the fields ever since I was little,” she says.
After earning a degree in agricultural engineering in Yamoussoukro, capital of the Ivory Coast, Diaby found a job as a sustainable development auditor. Part of her job was helping farmers improve their agricultural knowledge and practices. “It was us, the technicians coming out of school, that could come back and work with producers in rural areas to help them improve the conditions in which they lived,” she says.
Since 2022, she has coordinated the sustainability programmes of ECOOKIM, a union that represents 33 agricultural cooperatives (roughly 45 000 farmers) and Akagny Cacao, a cocoa exporter. Diaby and her team ensure that the cocoa beans Akagny buys and sells meet international sustainability certifications, such as the Rainforest Alliance, and increasingly strict EU rules.
The Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer of cocoa, exporting about two-thirds of production to the European Union and its chocolate makers. But production is a major driver of deforestation and is rife with child labour. From 2000 to 2019, about 2.4 million hectares of forest in the Ivory Coast were cleared to grow cocoa beans, a swath of land about the size of Rwanda.
In January, the European Investment Bank announced a €100 million intermediated loan with Banque Nationale d’Investissement (BNI), the biggest lender to the cocoa sector in the Ivory Coast. The loan will help youth employment, gender equality and the cocoa sector. About one-third of the funds will be dedicated to certified cocoa producers and companies like Akagny that process and export sustainable cocoa.
Intermediated loans allow banks such as BNI to give many small loans to companies around the country. BNI, in turn, lent Akagny €3.3 million, which it will use to buy certified cocoa crops. Profits from those crop sales fund investments in local communities, such as training and supplies to help farmers improve crop yields, support for programmes that increase female employment and financial autonomy, and the construction of new schools and other infrastructure like water towers. “Some of these communities don’t have access to drinking water,” Diaby explains.
Digital mapping keeps cocoa out of protected forests
Akagny works with local cooperatives to digitally map the exact location of crops to ensure they aren’t grown in protected areas. The geolocation of crops is then digitally matched with maps of protected areas provided by the Ivorian government and international organisations such as the European Forest Institute and Global Forest Watch. Akagny has been collecting these kinds of data since 2012.
“If the agent mapping the area receives a signal that the zone is off-limits, then we immediately stop our tracking and support for the producer,” Diaby says. “It’s a system that we’ve had in place for a long time, because we have to be sure that the crops aren’t in a restricted area.”
Local agents also collect information on the well-being of farmers and their families and feed everything into a central database. That database contains a wealth of information on individual communities, such as how many children attend school, the number of schools available and whether communities have access to safe water supplies.
Diaby says the data collected helps determine which projects ECOOKIM should fund. “For example, if the dropout rate is high or the rate of school enrollment in a community is low, it means that a school needs to be built there,” she says.
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Profit‑sharing lifts yields and livelihoods
Cocoa profits are also used to finance microloans for farmers, who rarely have access to bank credit, and to provide products that improve plant health and productivity. At the same time, ECOOKIM trains farmers on good agricultural practices and on social issues, such as child labour, forced work and discrimination.
The union also offers savings programmes to women that enable them to take out small loans to grow their own crops or to start small businesses, such as shops or eateries. While women cultivate cocoa with their families, they rarely control the money earned. “The idea is to create an income-generating activity for women,” Diaby says.
The ultimate goal is to make agriculture more profitable so that farmers and their families can live a better life. But Diaby worries climate change could derail those efforts. Extreme weather like droughts and floods is pushing down cocoa production, as is a lack of investment in renewing crops. These pressures could erode recent income gains.
“The producer must have an income that allows him to live decently,” she says. “We haven’t yet achieved that level, and I’m afraid that climate change and lower production will actually increase the gap.”
