CLMRS in action

Our Impact Cheerleader Diara lives in Ghana 70% of the year. From here she also regularly visits our partner cooperatives in Ivory Coast and has been busy implementing the Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation System over the past year. The CL.. what!? We call it CLMRS. Curious how things are going? Read along with Diara's personal updates!

IVORY COAST: visiting the coops with ICI

At the end of 2017, we visited all the coops together with ICI (International Cocoa Initiative) to evaluate the CLMRS. We do this every 2/3 months. And that's quite a job, because the cooperatives are not next to each other. We sit in the car for hours a day until our buttocks hurt.
Every time we are happy when we arrive at a coop and the strong smell of the cocoa beans. When we arrived, we sat together with management, ICI employees and a number of Community Facilitators. The Community Facilitators are the people from the community itself who are responsible for the CLMRS. We discuss what is going well and especially what could be improved. Sometimes the materials do not work properly, the CFs have too many farmers, certain parts of the system are too unclear, or there are problems with the internet. The feedback from the farmers is super educational. For us, but also for ICI. We hope that these trips will help make the system as user-friendly as possible for our partner coops and facilitate communication between ICI and the coops. Ultimately, we want it to become a coop system! This time the complaints list was shorter than last year. On to the next visit!                                    

GHANA: On the road with the ambassador... for the CLMRS

And also an update about the CLMRS in Ghana. We have now been setting up the system for almost a year and it is now running at all cooperatives.

Last year we received a 50% subsidy from the Dutch government through the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) – RVO. Froukje from RVO visited several projects last month to view progress and also wanted to see the CLMRS in action! The ambassador heard about it and wanted to come along. And so a few days later we were in a van on the way to our partner cooperative ABOCFA. Once we arrived, we first sat with a very large group at a long table at ABOCFA's office. We then visited cocoa plantations and a small village. The ambassador asked hundreds of questions and everyone (management, CFs, farmers) took the time to answer all questions. He wanted to know about the system, the cooperative, the role of the government, but also about the life of the cocoa farmer, what else they do besides growing cocoa and how they try to achieve economies of scale. Farmers said that their grandparents sometimes had as much as 16 hectares of land, but unfortunately, due to fragmentation, this now often only has 2 hectares. But we also heard many positive stories from farmers who do everything besides being a farmer: some were teachers, taxi drivers, pastors and others had a small shop or worked as a hairdresser. It was very nice to see how the interaction between the farmers and the ambassador went more and more smoothly and the stories just kept coming!