At a Glance

Funder:

World Cocoa Foundation

Project Time Frame:

2009-2014

Cocoa Livelihoods Program: Increasing Income in West and Central Africa

With funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and members of the cocoa industry, the World Cocoa Foundation is implementing the Cocoa Livelihoods Program to provide interventions to increase household income in the cocoa-producing areas of five countries in West and Central Africa—Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Liberia. Through farmer-to-farmer training and other techniques, the goal is for one-third of cocoa-growing households in these countries to double their income from cocoa and non-cocoa sources within 10 years. In addition, stakeholders hope to see improvement in cocoa productivity. Funders are also interested in knowing if increased household income positively affects nutrition and children’s schooling outcomes, important nonmonetary measures of household well-being.

In order to include all five countries in the evaluation, we are using two different evaluation designs. Random assignment is being used in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. This design will allow us to attribute any changes in the outcomes being measured to the program’s interventions. These two countries were selected because of their impact on worldwide cocoa production and the availability of sufficient potential intervention and control sites within each country. A pre-post design will be used in the other three countries.

A baseline survey is currently being conducted, and will be used to assess impact in the pre-post countries, maximize precision of our impact estimates in the random assignment countries, and inform gender analyses of interest to funders. A three-year impact evaluation will provide information on longer-term effects, including overall take-up rates of offered services; adoption of new practices; and extent of changes in production and productivity, household income, nutrition, and education. We are also examining specific effects for women cocoa farmers.