Chocolate Has A Name

About this event

“Believe me, I have seen the dignity of a man stripped by the power of a story and the dignity of a people restored to them by the power of a story.

About a year ago, we told the story; CHOCOLATE HAS A NAME and came face-to-face with the harrowing truth when Maame Boadua shared her lived experience as a cocoa farmer.

Today we tell another story that seeks to restore dignity back to cocoa growing communities by incorporating chocolate making into their curriculum at schools in the heart of Ghana’s cocoa growing region.

Join the Tribe and the rest of our family at Fairtrade on the 6th of March as Ghana commemorates it’s 65th independence day anniversary for an evening of storytelling, music and art and help us raise funds to support Africaniwa’s pilot project.

You’ll hear from artists and musicians, as well as the farmers, workers and teachers who are working with us to bring this vocational training to the girls at Tarkwa Breman Girls School in the Western Region of Ghana.

Most people in cocoa growing communities cannot afford the luxury of spending on a bar of chocolate.

This is not accidental or incidental. It is historical, deeply structural, unfair and unjust. A system carefully designed to leave the cocoa farming communities impoverished. We believe that in a fairer world, children in cocoa growing communities should be able to join children in the UK who enjoy between 80 to 90 million chocolate eggs at Easter.

In light of the current climate crisis, communities in the cocoa growing areas are amongst many in the Global South who are currently stood on the front line wading their way through the crisis. Cocoa farming is their heritage, their life and their all. These communities are amongst the many in the Global South who have contributed the least to the crisis but are suffering the most. Those who are least able to mitigate and adapt to the crisis and for these communities, the easiest way to adapt to the changing climate is by migration. Consequently, rendering some of the most vulnerable members of our human family, victims to human traffickers. Over the last few years a lot of the young people in these communities have migrated to the southern part of the country in search of better jobs, engaged in illegal mining, some of whom have ended up in Libya in hopes of crossing the Mediterranean onto “greener pastures”

In these communities, it’s women and girls who suffer the most. Many young girls have to drop out of school as a result of teenage pregnancy with no skill set to support themselves or their babies. This project “CHOCOLATE HAS A NAME” seeks to equip these cocoa growing communities to be able to mitigate and adapt to the uncertainties of the climate crisis by learning to put value on their produce at the basic level of their education and also to ensure that children in these communities are assured, a more nourished nutrition.

This is an invitation on a journey to justice for cocoa growing communities. A journey to STAND WITH FARMERS, a journey where people are priced over their produce and the thumbprint is of more importance than the bar code. It’s an invitation to support cocoa growing communities to enjoy the fruit of their labour, change the script and own their narrative because, CHOCOLATE HAS A NAME.”