By Akosua Frema Frempong
Fairtrade Africa has held a graduation ceremony in Kumasi for 14 students who have undergone gender training to become gender ambassadors under its Sustainable, Democratic, and Inclusive Cocoa Cooperatives in West Africa, Project NORAD.
The project is being implemented with the support of Fairtrade Norway for Development Cooperation, a department under the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Sustainable Democratic and Inclusive Cocoa Cooperatives in West Africa project is designed to improve the technical and democratic capacity of cocoa cooperatives and to enhance their inclusiveness by strengthening the capacity of vulnerable and excluded groups, such as women and youth, to assume leadership positions and participate in decision-making processes.
This is because the cocoa sector continues to be important to Ghana’s economy despite several challenges including poverty and gender inequality. Cooperatives have therefore been identified as an important lever to solve the many challenges faced by individual farmers. The project aims to, among others, directly strengthen 90 beneficiaries that is 90 percent women and 30 thousand indirectly from 30 cooperatives to assume positions or leadership roles and participate in decision-making processes in their cooperatives and communities.
The projector will also directly strengthen 40 youth beneficiaries 50 percent women and 50 percent men, and indirectly two thousand youth from 20 cooperatives to become interested in the management of producer organizations and to consider taking positions and participating in decision-making processes in their cooperatives and communities as well as implementing at least two new democratic practices in the operational processes namely, the Women’s School of Leadership and the Young Cooperative Managers Academy.
The Women’s School of Leadership already has several years of experience in La Côte d’Ivoire since 2017. However, Young Cooperative Managers Academy which is a new concept in both La Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, seeks to provide youth with training modules on critical and relevant topics, as well as hands-on assignments, coaching, and mentoring.
At the maiden graduation ceremony beneficiaries of the project, the Programme Director of Fairtrade Africa, Mr. Chris Oluoch challenged them to apply the knowledge and skills acquired to improve their households, cooperatives, and communities.
“As we said before, it is to empower the youth and women in our certified entities. Also, we work with organized cooperative societies as the basic unit for Fairtrade certification. So in line with strategic interventions and aspirations for 2021–2025, we have committed to empowering these cooperative societies through the module of education, and with that, I mean empowering the women and youth. So that links back to NORAD’s main objectives of empowerment through the women School of Leadership model that we are pursuing under NORAD. Yes, we are extending because we want to extend our reach much as possible as I mentioned earlier Fairtrade works in 28 countries across Africa to produce a network we really want to reach as much as possible in the rest of other parts of Africa with the project interventions.
Through the normal certification of programming, we are not able to address some of the thematic areas like the empowerment of women and youth. But through such projects like NORAD we get funds from our donors and partners which then we commit to help us to deepen our impact through the project intervention like what we are doing in La Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana at the moment’’ he explained.
The Chief Executive Officer of Fairtrade Norway, Tone Faugli, was hopeful that the training would go a long way to boost the cocoa sector. Some beneficiaries from the women school of Leadership indicated that ‘’the NORAD project in empowering women is not at the disempowerment of men but rather to give women positive exposure in the society as a whole and to give the perception to the society and the country that not only are we women limited to the kitchen but we can do more if we are given the opportunity and platforms to do better, they explained.
The NORAD project is a blessing to us; we’ve learned a whole lot and all the modules that we treated are making a really good impact on us and our community, a beneficiary from the Young Cooperative Managers Academy noted.
The best-graduating students were presented with awards.
