Innovation We will also continue to innovate our approach through pilot projects and collaborations. In 2024/25 we started 2 new initiatives: a financial compensation model for cocoa farm renovation and a carbon insetting pilot. The insights gained from these pilots will guide decisions on scaling and inform the evolution of our broader strategy in the years ahead. Pilot to reduce carbon emissions on-farm Together with founding Mission Ally, Tony’s Chocolonely, and South Pole, this season, Tony’s Open Chain started developing the Fair Carbon Income Model for insetting Tony’s Chocolonely’s carbon emissions. As part of this project, South Pole developed an estimate of the carbon impact of the project, and a monitoring and sampling protocol for field data collection. The current pilot focuses on 3 partner cooperatives (ECAM, ESCOPAG and ASUNAFO). The consortium is currently still exploring different models to ensure that cocoa farmers receive fair compensation by developing an equitable pricing structure for the carbon sequestered. If the pilot is successful, we plan to scale the approach so that more partner cooperatives can benefit from this compensation model.
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Financial compensation for replanting cocoa Starting in the 2024/25 season, for 3 consecutive years, 250 beneficiaries at ECOJAD (the cooperative that you got to know better throughout this report), will receive annual compensation to support the planting of new cocoa trees. The compensation amount reflects the estimated income farmers would have earned had the trees not been replanted, based on farm yield and the living income reference price. This pilot targets a small group as part of testing the 100 Weeks Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA) approach, which integrates financial literacy training, VSLAs and weekly cash payments to compensate for replanted cocoa trees. This project also focuses on reducing gender-based inequalities by working directly with women, who tend to have a higher overall workload than men due to responsibilities around childcare, household chores, caring for livestock and farming other crops, as well as cocoa production tasks. 75 Depending on the results of this pilot, the intervention will be scaled to more farmers in the following years. 75. Skalidou, D. Women and Cocoa: Fairtrade Foundation research paper into the links between female participation in cocoa production and women’s economic empowerment. Fairtrade Foundation, February 2020.
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Ending exploitation in cocoa together
Living income
Climate, environment & productivity
Human rights
Governance & finances
Interesting appendices
Scaling for change
Introduction
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