Cocoa360

My name is Irma Lee Quarcoo and I am Cocoa360's Executive Director.  I chose this role after earning more than a decade of executive leadership experience in operations and project management.  

At Cocoa360, I am privileged to do work that is urgent, transformational, humbling and satisfying.  I am thrilled to lead a team of outstanding individuals who inspire me with their dedication and passion and without whom our work would not be possible.  I insist on authenticity by standing firmly in my truth and I invite my team to mirror this.  

I am a mother and a wife; my family is my raison d'être.  I strive to exemplify unapologetic excellence and confidence for my brilliant daughters. I teach Sunday school, and I love to dance.  I have a M.A. in International Relations from LECIAD and a B.A. in Mass Media from Hampton University.  

At Cocoa360, our goal is to shatter the systemic structures that trap rural communities in cycles of generational poverty.  

Our Farm-for-Impact Model is designed to leverage a community's existing resources, to improve access to quality education and healthcare. Community members provide volunteer labor on a community farm, and the profits are used to provide tuition-free education and deeply subsidized healthcare.  

In practice, our agro-campus, the Tarkwa Breman Center of Excellence,  consists of a community clinic, a Girls' school, and 15-acres of mature cocoa farms. Presently the profits from the farms are insufficient to cover all costs at the clinic and school.  Our project seeks to increase revenues to actualize the model in order to scale beyond the 8-rural communities we currently serve.  

Ultimately,  we are challenging established development paradigms by putting marginalized communities in the driver's seat of their own development, to achieve good health and wellbeing in their lives.

Ghana’s 800,000 small scale cocoa farmers make up 60% of the country's agricultural base.  These farmers contribute $3.2 billion in export revenue to the country per annum, yet most of them earn a per capita daily income of approximately USD $0.40-$0.45 for their efforts. This means in simple terms that these farmers can scarcely afford to feed themselves much less educate their children or seek medical attention when they feel unwell. 

The lack of access to quality healthcare means an increased likelihood of chronic illnesses as well a higher rate of mortality which impacts on the farmers ability to carry out their work and often to self-actualize.   Limited education perpetuates inter-generational poverty as households with uneducated heads are more likely to be poor.This combined lack of education and lack of access to quality healthcare, keeps these farmers and their families trapped in generational cycles of poverty.  

Through the “Farm-for-Impact model”, we are disrupting this cycle, by leveraging the community's labor to provide education for their children, access to quality healthcare and on-the-job training to ensure that they can achieve good health and wellbeing in their lives.  

The Farm-for-Impact model has three simple elements, community resources, community labour and Cocoa360

The Tarkwa Breman Centre of Excellence is Cocoa360’s agro-campus. It is the incubator for developing and researching the model and comprises the Tarkwa Breman Girls' School, community clinic, and community farms.  

We leverage the community's existing resources; the farm is the sustainability component of the model.  Farm profits offset costs at the school and clinic, and Cocoa360’s agronomist trains the volunteer farmers on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) which leads to improved yields, and consequently to greater disposable income.   

Community members provide volunteer labour on the farms in exchange for access to quality education for their daughters and quality healthcare at our clinic.

The school is our health prevention arm to dismantle the systemic causes of poverty through education. We focus on girls because better educated women tend to be healthier, participate more in the formal labor market, earn higher incomes, etc. These factors combined can help lift households, communities, and nations out of poverty.

The clinic is the treatment arm; to ensure that the community has access to quality healthcare in order to have the health required to achieve their goals. 

The Farm-for-Impact model, while adaptable, is specifically designed for Ghana’s 800,000 cocoa farmers.  Our point of entry is Tarkwa Breman and its 7 surrounding cocoa farming villages with a population of ~8000 people, where our headquarters is located. 

The way of life there is communal like most rural agrarian communities.  The community is interdependent; they share a limited number of clean water sources, they gather in the town square for community announcements and they attend weekly sittings of the chiefs and elders to have issues adjudicated, among other things.  

At inception, to secure community buy-in, we established a local advisory board- the Village Committee (VC) which is a community elected body of representatives from each of the villages to represent them in the affairs of the organization. The VC has sub-committees: The PTA, Farm, Clinic, and Land Committees which oversee and guide the activities of the organization relative to each of the specified areas.  

Some impact numbers include: 7000+ patients seen, 2500+ malaria cases treated , 63 babies delivered, and 167 young girls enrolled. The organization has also provided portable drinking water to serve over 800 homes via a dug borehole.

A 2010 study found that cocoa farming households’ expenditure exceeded their mean total income. Children in poor cocoa farming households are less likely to attend school than their higher income peers. Limited education perpetuates inter-generational poverty as households with uneducated heads are more likely to be poor.

Poverty and poor health worldwide are inextricably linked. Poverty increases the chances of poor health. Poor health, in turn, traps communities in poverty.

Our model elevates opportunities for these rural communities through the provision of education, healthcare and economic development. Further, through education and training, understanding is elevated amongst our constituents. 

Cocoa360’s inception was inspired by the grave poverty that the founder, Shadrack Frimpong experienced first-hand as a child growing up in Tarkwa Breman. At age nine, he contracted a water-borne infection from playing in polluted water bodies that nearly resulted in the amputation of his legs. Months passed before his parents - cocoa farmers, could afford to send him to the nearest hospital, several hours away. 

He went on to become the first person from his village to attend college in the U.S, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 with the university’s highest award, the President’s Engagement Prize (PEP). With the prize money, he founded Cocoa360.

The idea for the organization came when he heard for the first time in one of his classes at university that Ghana earns billions of dollars in export revenue from Cocoa. He was struck by the stark disparity between the impact of cocoa on the country and the reality of his family as cocoa farmers.  He was fortunate to gain support from his 4 roommates who joined him unreservedly on the journey to build the vision as co-founders. 

I was 19, it was summer 1998- Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I’d taken a gap year and was getting ready to start college in the fall.  I had an internship with USAID- Population, Health and Nutrition(PHN) department.  I’d grown up in Ghana, a “third-world country” in Africa and yet a trip down the hill from where we lived to down-town Port-au-Prince was the first time that I saw and understood real poverty. I still remember the shock and disbelief that I felt seeing that there were people in the world living in such deplorable conditions.  I felt the weight of every ounce of my privilege and for the first time was struck by the irony that a girl who’d grown up on the “dark continent” could possibly be witnessing real poverty for the first time on other shores.   I called my grandfather to lament my role, my place in the world given what I’d witnessed.  “What matters most is that your life is lived to leave the world a better place than you found it.”  These words became the guiding principle of my life and career choices.

I enjoy solving complex problems.  Over my nearly 20-year career across numerous sectors, I pride myself on my authenticity, adaptability and commitment to achieving results.   

Prior to joining Cocoa360, I had very limited experience with the non-profit world.  I’d built a successful career in real estate development.  I was offered the opportunity, during a meeting I took on my mother's behalf, to discuss the development of some land she owned.  The developer had just secured a $20million project in Accra and offered me the position as project manager based solely on that first meeting.  

In two years, with no prior experience, I delivered a successful project to an extremely satisfied client.  10-years later, I was leading my own $200million project.  As a female and at the time, I was typically the youngest and most unexpected face in the boardrooms I found myself in.  

While I was tenacious and driven prior to stepping on my first construction site, learning the craft of project management, particularly while leading multi-national and multidisciplinary teams resulted in my becoming more deliberate, systematic, focused and unrelenting in achieving my goals.  I transitioned effortlessly into operations leadership having developed a predilection for problem solving and people development. Becoming unapologetically authentic is my response to the bigotry and patriarchal hurdles that littered my path. 

Cocoa360 is a donor dependent entity.  I inherited the organization after a period of upheaval marked by high employee turn-over and significant donor apathy.  

With no prior experience with non-profit donor engagement, I focused my energy on understanding the problem.  I identified team cohesion and organizational health as my first goal and set about to understand who my team was and what they each brought to the table.  Fundamentally, it became clear that I had incredibly passionate and committed people; what we needed was alignment with the organization's vision. We clarified the message to make it digestible to every member of the team. 

The next task was to re-engage donors.  We identified the inconsistency in reporting and communication as the cause of the apathy.  I personally reached out to each donor to provide them with updated reports and acknowledgements of their contributions and took ownership of our shortcomings.  

Nearly a year later, several reports, emails, phone calls and mailing later, we’ve just begun to reap the dividends of our work.  Donors have started, albeit cautiously, to re-engage.  

Eugene said his team had been instructed to work overtime, and had also been told that they would not be paid the overtime wage they expected because the contractor was using a loophole in the labor law to keep them as “casuals” which meant they were not entitled to the same benefits.  

I investigated the claim and was livid upon establishing its veracity. I identified a clause in the contract which allowed me to take over the contractors operations without impacting the liability clauses.  I forced a closure of the labor loophole by issuing an engineer's instruction to the contract mandating that everyone receive proper compensation for their labor.  Furthermore, I shared the details of the implications of the impending delay with the team and secured their buy-in to meeting the deadline.  During the 2-week intensive 18-20hour per day shifts, I not only spent every moment with the team on site working side-by-side I  personally ensured that they received 3-square meals each.

We met our target and went on to complete the project on time and within budget.  I earned a very loyal team through that experience, and I particularly enjoy getting updates on their lives nearly a decade later. 

The Farm-for-Impact model's innovation is its multi-pronged, community-led, self-sustaining approach.  

Having identified health inequity as the underlying catalyst for the generational cycles of poverty that rural farming communities experience, the model's wholistic multi-pronged approach addresses two key social determinants of health: access to healthcare and education.  Choosing to educate girls tackles the problem for the future, while the provision of a community clinic tackles the problem in the present. 

The Village Committee, our local advisory board is directly and fully integrated into the organization operations.  At each level, we have community representation to ensure that the solutions we formulate are relevant and tailored to the real needs of the community.  Putting the community in the lead assures community buy-in and sets us up to win.  

Finally, the community farms provide an avenue for the solutions to stand alone and live beyond Cocoa360's involvement.  By teaching the farmers best farming practices, we are providing them a path to economic freedom. The economic autonomy that the farm revenue provides is an ongoing disruption to the cycles of poverty that previously trapped these communities.  

Our project currently serves ~8000 people between Tarkwa Breman and the 7 villages in its vicinity.  

We expect to focus on deepening our impact through the establishment of additional farms and income streams to improve our sustainability position within the next year.  Thus the population served will remain at ~8000.

Within five-years, we expect to scale the model to the wider Prestea-Huni Valley District through partnerships with the Ghana Educations Service and the Ghana Health Service.  We anticipate a constituent size of ~50,000.

With the renewed clarity of purpose that we've established for Cocoa360, we know that the critical next step is to establish sustainability in order to scale the model.  Over the next year, our focus is to expand our revenue streams through the acquisition of 50+ areas of farmland, the cultivation of annual crops to ensure year-round income which is not possible with seasonal crops like cocoa and the establishment of partnerships toward the achievement of these goals.  Along with our plans for increased revenue generation, we plan to expand our current program offering to establish a training facility for our volunteer farmers which will offer them some adult education as well as further training on best farming practices.

Based on our current projections, 2024 is the year we expect to achieve coverage of 100% of non-salaried expenses at the school from farm profits.  2025 is the target year for zero user fees at our clinic resulting from farm profits. 

Once our model is proven to be scalable it can be adapted for use in any rural community in the world.   

The acquisition of new farmland has proven to be quite the challenge over the past few years.  On the one part finding suitable land to purchase can be difficult.  On the other hand, while we were gifted an initial 50 areas of land by the chiefs on the onset of our project, taking possession of this acreage has proven to be more daunting than we expected.  Although the land belongs to the "stool" (Chiefs hold land in trust for the people), majority of it was actively being cultivated by members of the community who had prior permission from the chiefs.  When we received the land as a gift, we were assured that the chiefs has compensated the previous users for the loss of anticipated income however many of the families continue to dispute this.  As such we are faced with ongoing arbitration over the land in question.

The second most significant challenge we face annually is raising sufficient donor support to cover the operations and implementation cost such as salaries, rent etc. of our innovation.  

In scaling, we anticipate that the most significant hurdle will be establishing buy-in from the government agencies we hope to partner with.  The Ghana Education service operates all public schools in Ghana, while the Ghana Health Service is responsible for the rural medical facilities.  Fighting through the bureaucracy will likely be the most significant challenge here. 

Perseverance has thus far proven to be the most effective tool in our bid to resolve the land issues we are facing.  Remaining unrelenting while staying fully transparent in our operations has proven most effective.  As more members of the community come to appreciate the value of our work either through the use of our clinic, or through the trainings offered from our agronomist, they lean more and more on their fellow community members who may be presenting some of our hurdles.  The Village Committee has also been instrumental in maintaining the pressure on the chiefs to adjudicate the matters fairly.  As far as purchasing new farmland the barrier is financing, more suitable land is typically more expensive.  

Our strategy for covering our expenses includes the diversification of our donor pool.  We have historically gained majority of our funding from individuals. Going forward we are building a more ambidextrous development team to enable us to secure more institutional funds such as grants and prizes as well as corporate funding through CSR initiatives and partnerships.  Maintaining a consistent and timely reporting relationship with our donors is also key. 

Finally in our bid to scale, we will start slowly.  We will build a network and trust basis with the municipality through initial entry level partnerships with the public schools and health facilities in question.  We are already on that path based on our current partnership with the local public health facility in our Covid-19 response.  

On our education side, we have ongoing partnerships with Vanderbilt University and University of Pennsylvania school of Education through the development and ongoing review of our health curriculum.  Furthermore, we recevie interns from both institutions annually.

On the research side, were excited to be embarking on a new partnership with Yale School of Public Health to establish the Hecht Ghana Research Facility to research the impact of the Farm-for-Impact Model.  

Finally we have a standing partnership with Warburg Pincus that guarantees us a $25k grant annually.  

Our programs such as the school, clinic and farm are designed to become self-sustaining through revenues from our community farms. We plan to increase our farm revenues by acquiring more farm land and improving current farm yields through best farming practices. 

The operations of Cocoa360 including the Tarkwa Breman Center of Excellence-our Agro campus will be sustained through donations from individuals, corporations and institutions as well as grants and prizes like the Elevate Prize.  

We haven't achieved the sustainability balance for the programs yet, we anticipate that by 2025 we should have the correct balance of output from our farms to sustain the models programs through the acquisition of additional mature cocoa farms and the possible cultivation of new farms.  

Sustaining the operations/implementation component of our work will require improved development efforts such as donor engagement, crowd funding, partnerships and grants. 

Furthermore, we are exploring the development of social enterprises such as soap making and the diversification of our crop to increase revenues. 

We currently generate revenue from our 15-acre cocoa farm.  We earned $5,554 from 57 bags of cocoa harvested in 2019.  

We also generate revenue through user-fees (Co-pays) at our community clinic.  We earned $12,232 in revenue from clinic visits in 2019.  

We are seeking to raise $290,000. from a combination of grants, individual donors, and institutional partnerships.  

Budget Objectives: 

• Achieve 30% Revenue-to-cost ratio across all our cocoa farms
• Establish Healthcare-designated farm revenues
• Increase farm productivity
• Increase overall farm size
• Support implementation costs at our community clinic
• Support implementation costs at our school

$30,000 - Purchase of farm equipment:

• Computers & Technology
• Pruners
• Mistblowers
• Knapsack Sprayers
• Aboboyaa

$25,000 - Salaries for Hired Workers:

• Farm Managers
• Agronomist

$60,000 – Land Acquisition

• Healthcare Designated Farms – 30 acres
• Education Designated Farms – 20 acres
• Statutory fees 

$35,000 – Farmer Training and Extension Programs

• Hiring of extension officers
• Training Manuals and materials

$30,000 – Project Monitoring & Evaluation

• M&E Tools – Laptops, Software, Extension manuals
• M&E Training

$40,000 – Clinic Implementation Costs

• Salaries for health workers
• Medicine purchases
• Salaries for teachers
• Equipment and furniture

$70,000 – School Implementation Cost

• Salaries for teachers
• Equipment and furniture

Total Annual Budget - $290,000

We would apply funding from the elevate prize to address the following barriers to our work:

-Aquisition & Securing of additional farm land.

- Coverage of Operational/Implementation cost such as salaries, infrastructure development and technology.

-Finally, we would apply funding to build out the farmer adult education and and ongoing Good Farming Practice training programs to enable them to achieve the optimal yield from their own farms.   

- COCOBOD: The governments regulatory body for the cocoa industry.  Through COCOBODS extension programs we can secure free inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides for the farmers.  Furthermore a partnership that would provide us ongoing training would be vital. 

- Rainforest Alliance: A partnership to train and certify our farms as organic in order to attract higher premiums for our beans.  

- Partnership with Local Buying Companies (LBC's) who have the sole mandate for purchasing cocoa beans.  A partnership for a negotiated premium price from the possible sale of organic beans.