In January this year, Divine Chocolate’s Managing Director, Ruth Harding, travelled to Ghana to visit Kuapa Kokoo and see the Labour Rights Programme in action. During her time there, she met farmers, tenants and the local programme team to understand how a simple commitment to written contracts is helping to strengthen cocoa farming communities. 

Making invisible workforces in cocoa visible  

An integral part of my recent visit to Ghana was to spend time with the farmers, tenants and the programme team behind the Labour Rights Programme and to see in practice how this relatively simple mechanism of signing written contracts is having a long lasting impact in cocoa farming communities.  

For many farmers, extra hands are needed during busy times of the year, such as harvest. For some, help is needed for the more physically demanding aspects of the work and for others, help is needed to look after dispersed plots of land which are geographically much further away.  The reasons can be many, and in turn the relationships between the farmer and these tenant farmers are unique and, in Ghanian cocoa farms, often informal and guided by local custom. Renumeration comes from the sale of the harvest. It can be divided equally between the farmer and tenant or three-ways between the farmer, tenant and the land, with the land’s portion meaning tools, fertilizer or pesticides. There are other considerations such as whether the land has already been cultivated, who finds and pays for input materials such as seedlings, fertiliser or machetes, the balance between other food crops and cocoa are all considered and decided upon, verbally.  

Thinking about your own employment contract. If it wasn’t written down, could you recall every detail? Could your employer?  

Naturally, misunderstandings can occur as situations evolve and change over time. Feelings can emerge from either side that they have been disrespected, deceived or even cheated. Partnerships can be negatively impacted with one side losing out. Work can be left incomplete or payments not matching expectations.  

The Labour Rights Programme seeks to solve this by introducing written contracts signed by both farmer and tenant. The output appears simple but, until recently, Divine Chocolate and Kuapa Kokoo were the only organisations addressing the rights of tenants in this way. And why? Because a contract is only worthwhile if it is backed by trusted supporting institutions within the community. A lot of the success of the programme is because each contract is witnessed by respected members of the community and upheld by Labour Rights Committees (LRCs) 

Those involved undergo training on both labour rights issues and conflict resolution so that the LRCs can serve as forums where farmers or tenants can bring disputes and have them resolved in a fair way. And of course, all this is enabled and underpinned by strong communities and cooperatives.  

Reports from both tenants and farmers from the Suhum region that we visited suggested that conflicts were decreasing, farmers felt more respected, while tenants described feeling recognised as employees. Another more subtle realisation is that these contracts are granting tenants a sense of security and, in turn, place. Tenants, by the very nature of not being land-owners are often more mobile. We heard firsthand that they feel more able to settle in the community, invest in their homes and send their children to school. But there is more we can do. When we asked the tenants of one community we visited how many had signed contracts with the farmers who own the land, only one hand was raised. When questioned further, it seemed this is because those farmers live in Accra and don’t yet know about the Programme, a point of course that the programme team were keen to address. 

My biggest takeaway however, came from statement made by the Programme Lead Prempeh Agyemang who said that the Programme is ‘Making invisible workforces in cocoa visible.’