From tiny cocoa beans nestled in colorful pods to a delicious velvety confection, your favorite chocolate bar undergoes a remarkable transformation before reaching your hands. At the heart of this journey are cocoa farmers who have built their livelihoods on the cocoa industry. Meet some of the women and men in three cocoa cooperatives in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Enterprising women are key to generating diverse economic opportunities in Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa-growing areas.
Our monthly photo series highlights the beauty and emotion in the lives of our clients around the world.
The women behind Mishky Cacao decided to create a safer future for their families and community – transitioning from coca to cocoa production and generating new value by manufacturing chocolate.
Meet Dara Obispo, a 19-year-old single mother living in Peru’s Amazon basin. With tailored agronomy and financial literacy training, she has increased her cocoa production seven-fold — and gained a new outlook on life.
Yash Mehta is a former TechnoServe Fellow who worked remotely in Ghana earlier this year, where he helped a cocoa processing company improve its business plan and support smallholder farmers to increase their yields and incomes. In this Q&A, Yash shares what his remote fellowship experience was like and how it positively impacted his career path.
In 2019, Kyle and Katina Connaughton, owners/operators of SingleThread Farms, traveled to Peru through the Chefs for Change initiative – a program that connects the world’s best chefs to smallholder farmers in developing countries.
Chocolate is one of the world’s most popular foods, but who actually grows the cocoa that serves as the base for this delicious treat? Meet a few of the farmers who are changing their lives using income from cocoa.
In San Martin, the Apahuit cooperative is working alongside TechnoServe and their farmer members to implement simple, ecofriendly techniques that boost their cocoa yields, improve incomes, and fight deforestation.
Smallholder farmers face increasing difficulty growing crops as a result of climate change. Take our quiz to see how much you know about the impact of climate change on small farmers, and the "climate-smart" approaches that can help.
