Program
Description
The Cocoa & Forest: Knowledge Exchange Program (C&F) was organized by Kinomé, a social business with 16 years expertise, to deliver on the technical aspects of this work, and a lead consultant Wendy Arenas (founder of Alisos), a social scientist which coordinates the Cocoa & Peace Initiative in Colombia, to conduct capacity building activities for knowledge exchange and enhance coordination. The combination of these two areas of expertise provided both the learning techniques and technical contents to ensure knowledge exchange and adoption. The Program was supported by the World Bank, specifically the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, which is joining the global efforts of preserving forests and improving livelihoods through a project that aims to explore public-private collaboration opportunities with relevant networks and to develop topical deep dives and knowledge products to inform private sector strategies and facilitate effective on-the-ground actions in selected jurisdictions. This Program represented a window of opportunity to facilitate and solidify the dialogue between Africa and LATAC within the different stakeholders of the cocoa value chain and interested organizations belonging to the six participating countries: Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Ghana and Ivory Coast. It concluded with the creation of a Global Community of Knowledge and Practice for a Sustainable Cocoa.
Objectives
The program aims to facilitate and promote the exchange of knowledge between cocoa-producing countries with the objective of promoting a sustainable, zero-deforestation and transparent value chain. It aims to:
A selected group of participants from each country (around 7 to 10 people), denominated as “core groups’ went through C&F’s first phase: A very complete, high level professional training program that provided tools on processes and technical fronts, as well as coaching. It allows for the exchange between various cocoa producing countries’ counterparts, as well as access to relevant international players in the sector. These elements encourage the efforts of local sustainable cocoa initiatives and the alignment and coordination between them.
The second phase was focused on the development of different scenarios for the knowledge exchange between actors in the value chain around the world. For this phase, the core groups and other actors from different organizations from the public, private sector, civil society, international cooperation, among others were invited to consolidate and build a joint vision of the global cocoa network by 2030.
