Party in Blaisekro

Last week there was a big party in the village of Blaisekro Sud! A new primary school has been built. It was opened with a major event, including a ribbon cutting, in one of the villages where Tony's Chocolonely buys its cocoa in Ivory Coast. This school was built in recent months by the community with financial support from the Chocolonely Foundation.

An important precondition

In the village where hardly any visitors normally come, there were now suddenly many dignitaries. Not only local Chiefs had put on their best clothes, the Ministers of Agriculture and Education had also come to open the school. This indicates that it was a special event. This is the first time that children in the community where our partner farmers live and work can attend an official school. In the village there was only a small school built by the farmers themselves without an official teacher, so the government did not recognize the school and did not make teaching materials such as textbooks available.

Tony's Chocolonely is very proud that we have contributed to the construction of this school through the Chocolonely Foundation. With this opening we are taking another important step in creating the preconditions to truly eradicate child labor. After all, good education is essential if you want to give your children a future.

Daily reality

A week before the official opening, Team Tony's visited the school. We drive on a bumpy unpaved road with a few hours ahead of us. While we avoid the holes in the road, we also have to be careful not to scoop a little boy of about 10 years old. With a large bag containing 35 kilos of cocoa on his head, he dives onto the roadside.

Unfortunately, this is not an unusual picture, but we encounter it more often than we would like when we are traveling with Team Tony's in Ivory Coast. Together with Ecookim (that is the name of our partner cooperative) we are working hard to eradicate illegal child labor, so that the children of cocoa farmers no longer have to do this work. The construction of a school is one of the steps we have taken together with the cooperative.

Insight into our chain

Even in Tony's chain, situations sometimes occur that we want to stop as quickly as possible. We are aware of the situation on the plantations of the cooperatives we work with, because we purchase our cocoa beans according to the Bean to Bar principle. Because Tony's is one of the few chocolate makers who knows exactly where the beans come from, we have been able to research the exact situation of the cocoa farmers who supply the beans to us. Unfortunately, in the communities where we work, there are still children who do too much work and have to work long hours on the cocoa plantation with their parents. Tony's now buys cocoa from farmers in a community where there is actually nothing; no electricity, no water and certainly no facilities such as healthcare or, until last week, good education.

Over the next four years we will work with farmers and cooperatives to structurally improve this situation and we will measure the results of our approach. Of course we will keep you informed of the results.

But secretly, as Tony's, we thought the most exciting moment of our trip was when we had our latest flavors approved by the farmers; After all, it is their cocoa that is in our bars. And that the farmers are just as Crazy about Chocolate and Serious about People as we are, you can see that here: