The Cocoa and Coffee Inter-Professional Council (CICC) of Cameroon met with Gabriel Mbairobé, the Minister of Agriculture and Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana, the Minister of Commerce, to launch a program to promote and support women in cocoa. Specifically, women living in rural areas are the target of the initiative which is designed to help them out of poverty through cocoa farming.
The program works by training women, who often carry the largest workload, to start a small cocoa plantation, with perhaps as little as 0.5 hectares. The women will be given seedlings and training on how to conduct selective logging were necessary, planting and cultivating the crop.
The CICC believes that although the price of cocoa is comparatively low, even selling at a discount compared to other countries like Ghana or Côte d’Ivoire will offer some relief to the level of poverty that they already endure.
There is an expectation that this initiative will contribute to the countries efforts to increase their overall cocoa exports, which were 365,000 tons in 2019 to nearer 600,000 tons.
