Enabling Landscape and Community-led Natural Resource Management
Launched in January 2019, the Kakum Cocoa Agroforestry Landscape Program in Ghana is an exciting new partnership between Hershey, the Nature Conservation Research Centre, Ghana’s Forestry Commission, the Ghana Cocoa Board and our supplier, Ecom Agrotrade Ltd. The purpose of the program is to transform the cocoa-forest landscape into a more sustainable cocoa agroforestry system.
The program has trained more than 250 community leaders to sustainably manage their cocoa farming and lands that surround the Kakum National Park—an area equivalent to 20 times the size of Manhattan. This has been done through the creation of by-laws, management plans and monitoring systems that protect the forest and its biodiversity, while improving farming practices and incomes.
One-third of trainees were women and there are now 31 Community Resource Management Committees set up across four larger areas covering over 20,000 hectares. We also provided Climate Smart Agricultural training to 50 percent of farmers in Hershey’s supply chain and distributed shade trees to all farmers in the program. In October 2019, Hershey received an award in recognition of our efforts and leadership toward Ghana’s REDD+ implementation of the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Program for our work in Kakum.
