Cocoa360

At Cocoa360, we leverage revenues from community-run farms to improve education and health outcomes for cocoa-growing communities. This is done without long-term reliance on foreign aid.

Our vision is to create a world where a child’s location in a rural, cocoa-growing community doesn’t stop them from fulfilling their fullest potential for the greater good of our world.

Our mission is to put cocoa farmers and their families in the driver’s seat to improve educational and health outcomes for their children from within, harvest after harvest. 

Our core values are: Excellence, Responsibility, Integrity, Hard work, Honesty,Communality, Teamwork, Empathy, Sympathy and Trust as explained below.

- Excellence: As an organization that prides itself on being unique, we work to distinguish ourselves in all we do. We maintain the highest quality standard across all of our departments. We are working hard to build a center of excellence in Tarkwa Breman through our organizational culture, values and lifestyle.

- Responsibility: We are conscious of our deeds and know that we are not only accountable to our stakeholders but also ourselves. We take responsibility for our actions and celebrate our achievements, no matter how big or small. We take accountability by admitting to our mistakes and work hard to correct them.

- Integrity: We are an imperfect group of people on a mission to change the world, hence our ability to work in truth and be honest with ourselves about where we are, who we are and what we are doing right or wrong.

- Hard work: Every day, we set out to contribute our team effort in all legal means towards attaining our goals. The obstacles we face never discourage us, we are rather motivated by them to always give off our best.

- Honesty: We don’t compromise on the truth. We believe in people who own up for their shortfalls. Owning up shows maturity and allows room for growth and progress.

- Communality: We believe in the common good of all and work towards making society a better place through our collective efforts.

- Teamwork: We work as a unit in a coherent manner across organizational and cultural boundaries to achieve extraordinary performance for our country, community and ourselves.

- Empathy:  We understand that our members, community and stakeholders have individual emotional and psychological needs that can only be met through compassion hence we go out of the usual organizational way to assist them as much as we can when the need arises.

- Sympathy: We rejoice with those who rejoice and also mourn with those who mourn. We are very much concerned about the mood of our staff since we know their mood affects their output and the overall wellbeing of the organization.

- Trust:  We know that trust is earned. Building trust among us, our community members and with our stakeholders is very dear to our hearts. We do this by honoring our promises.

Moro Seidu is our Chief Program Officer. He runs all program related to  education in Tarkwa Breman as well as the Tarkwa Breman Clinic. Examples of programs include the Hunger-Free Education Program where students are provided with meals and the Better Health for Students Program which is a full-coverage health insurance program for students. 

Moro is an agricultural economist, data analyst, M&E, and community engagement expert. He has over 15 years of experience in development issues, policy design, implementation, and management. Moro’s firm understanding of health economics and education has aided the improvement of health and education outcomes at Tarkwa Breman, Western region. In the past, he led evidence-driven projects for the US Embassy in Ghana, US Department of State, Star Ghana (with funding from the EU, DANIDA, and UKAid), International Open Data, Global Investigative Journalism Network, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa, and Ocean 5, among others. His main interests are sustainable community financing, policy analysis, financial inclusion, climate change, health economics, and gender issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. He is a fellow of the US Government, Young African Leaders Initiative. Moro holds a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Economics from CCSHAU, India.

Every project management team member is able to dedicate at least 4 hours per week to the project to ensure that the team can effectively support the project's objectives while balancing other priorities within the organization. 

Decomposing the project into more minor activities with clear dependencies will enable the Team Lead to assign tasks to the supporting team members to free up their time, minimizing any potential conflicts of interest with other priorities. The team lead will leverage project task management tools such as Trello, Asana, or Microsoft Planner to streamline workflows and assign tasks to the team members.

Effective communication and engagement with the team are the pivots that hold the project execution together. The team lead will institute periodic team meetings to get project updates, discuss progress and risks, and identify mitigation strategies. The Team Lead will provide regular reports to the project sponsor to keep them updated on the project's progress.

In a nutshell the team Lead and supporting team are well-positioned to support the LEAP Project while balancing other priorities within the organization. With robust project management methodologies and the effective utilization of resources, the team will achieve the project's desired outcomes efficiently and effectively.

Our “FARM-FOR-IMPACT MODEL” ensures that community cocoa farm revenues support the effective delivery of early childhood education in rural communities.

As the world’s second leading exporter of cocoa, Ghana brings in approximately $2 billion in cocoa revenue annually, yet the average cocoa farmer earns less than fifty cents a day, trapping Cocoa farmers and their children in cycles of generational poverty. This problem is widespread: the country is home to approximately 1.6 million farmers in over 1,300 cocoa-growing communities. Within these communities, many families live without access to affordable, quality education - a tool that can catapult them out of poverty.

Though the Ghanaian government has established schools in these communities, attracting and retaining quality teachers in rural areas has been a struggle. This creates a barrier to children in these communities acquiring quality, uninterrupted education, especially in their early years. It is no surprise then that 75% of children in cocoa-growing communities do not attend Early Childhood Education (ECE) which has implications on their subsequent success in their long term educational endeavors. 

Cocoa360 has successfully pioneered a  “farm-for-impact” model of development that invests revenue from community cocoa farms into education and health improvements in rural communities thus fully addressing the de-prioritization of early childhood education in rural cocoa growing communities. . 

The model works as follows:

- Village committees designate specific acres of land as available for purchase for communal use. Cocoa360 then purchases these lands to be used as community farms. 
- Farmers from the community dedicate time each season to work on the community farm.
- The proceeds from the community farm are sold and the profits are used to invest in improvements in the education system of the community with priority given to incentives such as provision of accommodation and primary health insurance that play a critical attracting and retaining quality teachers in rural areas. 

A unique hallmark of our model is what we call our “implementation board of directors;” a group of  community leaders who command influence and respect. These individuals act as the voice of the community in respect to resource allocation and program feedback and work with Cocoa360 to ensure the profits from the farm lands are used to meet local needs. 

Our model is designed to be self-sustaining. With a one-time capital infusion or grant to get the project off the ground, communities can then sustain the improved education outcomes through the revenue generated from the community farms. 

Our model also has wide implications for the international development community - we represent a switch from continuous dependence on donor funds to sustain social good to a collaborative approach where donors provide short-term investments (circumventing the issue of donor fatigue) and communities parlay these investments into long-term impact. 

The research conducted is primarily formative (case studies). Please find citations below:

- Frimpong SO, Vermund SH. The role of agriculture in achieving Universal Health Coverage in Africa. J Glob Health. 2022 Jul 16;12:03053. doi: 10.7189/jogh.12.03053. PMID: 35841623; PMCID: PMC9288254. in which Cocoa360 was used as a case study on how agriculture can be used to improve health outcomes. 

- Frimpong S, Paintsil E. A Case for Girl-child Education to Prevent and Curb the Impact of Emerging Infectious Diseases Epidemics. Yale J Biol Med. 2020 Sep 30;93(4):579-585. PMID: 33005122; PMCID: PMC7513442. in which Cocoa360 was used as a case study to show how improved educational outcomes for girls can lead to improved health outcomes for diseases such as HIV/ AIDS. 

- Frimpong, S., Russell, A. R., & Handy, F. (2020). Chapter 21: Re-imagining community development: The Cocoa360 model. Research Handbook on Community Development. https://doi.org/10.4337/978178...  in which Cocoa360 was used as a case study on re-imaging community development strategies. 

With implementation support of $150,000 from the University of Pennsylvania and later research funding of $75,000 from Yale University’s School of Public Health, we piloted a study in which we assessed how the FFI model could improve early childhood education outcomes. 

From this 4-year pilot study, we established a tuition-free school, the Tarkwa Breman Girls School (TBGS), and a clinic, the Tarkwa Breman Community Clinic (TBCC), situated on 60 acres of cultivated and uncultivated community land in Ghana. By leveraging the FFI model, Cocoa360 has worked with community members to fund 100% housing and primary healthcare needs of teachers, created improved working and living conditions as well as offered more training opportunities to teachers at TBGS with revenues from the cocoa farm. Findings from our pilot study show that the attendance rate at TBGS is 97% (on average), compared to the national rural attendance rate of 70%. We also have a high teacher retention rate of approximately (95%) and a teacher-to-student ratio of 1:20 (Preschool) and 1:25 (primary). These are less when compared to the national teacher-student ratio of 1:27 in 2019 and even much lesser when compared to the national rural teacher-student ratio of 1:61-100.

The above suggests that applying the FFI model towards non-tuition expenses (such as housing and primary healthcare needs of teachers, and funding training opportunities for teachers while also taking care of student primary healthcare) will be a success as we test it and prepare to scale it into other communities and countries.

Apart from the above, we learned the following:

• Government requires the support of communities to effectively improve Early Childhood Education in rural areas

• Administrators, teachers, and caregivers working with pupils each day are at the center of creating high-quality early care and education. Current teaching staff find it difficult living in rural communities since they spend most of their lives and training in urban areas; have a low education level, and have average annual incomes under the national poverty level for a family of four, despite efforts to promote higher qualifications and access to continued professional development. 

• Improving working and living conditions as well as offering more training opportunities are important for the recruitment and retention of rural teachers in rural areas. Apart from salary, housing policies are the most attractive recruitment strategy for rural teachers.

• Quality early childhood education programs must be supported by an early childhood service system that includes access to healthcare services for pupils, comprehensive parent engagement that is responsive to parent’s needs, and family support services to help families access resources and build their capacity to support their children’s development. This is easily done when communities effectively partner with the government. These are easily achieved when the government forges a sustainable community financing partnership with the rural communities which FFI currently provides.

Having successfully deployed the FFI model in Tarkwa Breman, Cocoa360 seeks to replicate this success in the 1200+ cocoa communities in Ghana starting with the 22 in the Western Region. 

While we have a few case studies on our model, to effectively scale the model across the nation in partnership with the government, we need to prove correlation between the model and the outcomes observed. Namely, we seek to answer the following key questions:

• Does the  FFI model improve teacher-child interactions, school readiness, and learning?

• Does the FFI model change parental perceptions and expectations of a quality early childhood education?

• Does working on the communal farm also impact yields for parents on their individual cocoa farms?

Secondary questions we have are:

• Does the FFI model improve student and teacher attendance at school?

• Does the FFI model reduce child and forced labour on farms in cocoa-growing communities?

• What factors hinder and/or promote parental involvement in farm labour to generate revenues for the ECE financing intervention?

• Does the  FFI model improve teacher-child interactions, school readiness, and learning?

• Does the FFI model change parental perceptions and expectations of a quality early childhood education?

• Does working on the communal farm also impact yields for parents on their individual cocoa farms?

Our expectation at the end of the 12 weeks is a research paper answering the questions outlined above using existing data. 

A key thing for us is to be able to show that the improvements being seen at Tarkwa Breman Girls School are as a result of or, at least could reasonably be attributed to, the efforts of Cocoa360 through the Farm-For-Impact (FFI) model. More pertinently, we would like to know which aspects of the FFI model have the most impact on the outcomes desired. 

To that end, we would love to establish a correlation between Cocoa360s efforts and the metrics of interest thus we would desire a correlational study or a multi-measure study. 

While we suggest the above, we also remain open to the recommendations of the selected fellows on how best to approach this. 

At the end of the project, Cocoa360 intends to use the outputs in the following ways:

1) Improve upon the FFI model based on the findings and recommendations of the research conducted. We would like to ensure that the intervention effectively leads to the outcomes desired for the communities served.

2) Establish a partnership with the government to show how the FFI model can be beneficial in supporting the government's efforts in rural education. This will enable the intervention to scale more rapidly and benefit many more cocoa growing communities. 

Short-term outcomes: The desired short-term outcomes of this project are to provide immediate educational improvements and access to quality education in participating cocoa communities. More specifically:

• Reduce teacher attrition
• Increase teacher attendance 
• Improve accessibility and quality of early childhood education
• Increase school enrolments in rural communities
• Encourage a younger start for school-going age children in the participating communities (from 9-12 years to 4 years old)
• Increase pupil school attendance rate
• Reduce child and forced labour in cocoa growing communities

Long term outcomes: The desired long-term outcome of this project is that cocoa farmers can break through the cycle of generational poverty and for communities to be fully able to use their resources to invest in their community’s education. More specifically:

• Increase community participation, especially women, in decision making
• Increase community resource integration in supporting needs such as education
• Reduce participating communities' reliance on government financing, positioning participants as active partners instead of hand-out recipients 
• Improve community infrastructure development
• Increase cocoa productivity