Harriet Nakabaale has named her Kampala yard “Camp Green” for the abundant vegetables she is able to produce from it. Photo: Ami Vitale

It’s planting season where I live north of Boston. I’ve never been very good at getting a garden to grow, which is why I was blown away when I walked through the gate into Harriet Nakabaale’s small city yard in Kampala, Uganda, a few weeks ago. She had planted just about every inch of it—and all of it was green and edible. It was a true victory garden, especially in a place like Kampala where the hard-packed earth in crowded neighborhoods can appear so unforgiving. You just have to know how to work it, like Nakabaale does—patiently, with absolute devotion, and the knowledge that all your hard work will pay off in heaps of healthy vegetables.

For all you would-be gardeners out there, maybe this photo of Nakabaale—snapped in a rare moment of repose—will serve as a bit of inspiration to get you going.

And watch for others that we’ll be sharing. They are part of an ambitious effort to advise the Rockefeller Foundation in identifying promising innovations in African agriculture for small farmers. The idea was to do a scan of work being done across sub-Saharan Africa by our peers as well as local citizen groups, organizations,  governments, and corporations, and then to try to identify ideas and projects that might be both innovative and scalable. We are writing up our findings now for the foundation to present at its centennial celebration in Nigeria in July. In the meantime, we have a treasure trove of great ideas, stories, and pictures–including the one above taken by Ami Vitale—of incredible people and innovations to share with you.

Here’s a real treat for chocolate lovers: proof that no company is too big to listen to customers like you.

Exactly one month ago, Oxfam launched the Behind the Brands scorecard with a call for consumers to “change the way the food companies that make your favorite brands do business.” We kicked off the effort by asking you to take action in support of women cocoa farmers around the world, many of whom face poverty, low wages, and discrimination.

In an incredible response, more than 65,000 people sent messages asking companies to improve their policies and help women cocoa growers get a fair deal. Tens of thousands of you also tweeted, shared our messages on Facebook, and attended events around the country. (See some examples in the video below.)

Today, thanks to your efforts, two of the world’s biggest chocolate companies have shown they’re listening. Mars and Nestlé have agreed to do more to “know and show” how women are being treated in their cocoa supply chains, to commit to a plan of action, to work to sign on to the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles, and to work with industry organizations to address gender issues. (Learn more about their commitments here.) We’re encouraged by their commitments and the effects these  will ultimately have on the women who grow and pick the key ingredient in our favorite chocolate treats.

“Women cocoa farmers and consumers around the globe have made their voices heard,” said Alison Woodhead, manager for Oxfam’s Behind the Brands campaign. “Mars and Nestlé have taken important steps to show the farmers they rely on, their customers, and the rest of the food industry that they care about the conditions women face in their supply chains.”

Oxfam is looking forward to working with Mars and Nestlé to ensure that they keep their promises to women cocoa farmers. For now, help maintain the momentum by calling on another of the world’s biggest chocolate companies, Mondelez International (maker of products like Oreos), to follow suit. Add your voice today.

It’s no secret that chocolate companies like Mars, Nestlé, and Mondelez target women with their advertisements. But when it comes to how the companies deal with women in their supply chains…it’s a mess.

Women in chocolate supply chains face, inequality, hunger, and poverty. They are often paid less than men and have less access to training and other resources that would make their lives better. When they face discrimination or abuse at work, many women have no way to complain or fight back. But companies are doing little to address these problems.

To really drive home this disconnect, here are some of the lamest, most patronizing chocolate ads that target women. Did we miss any?  Share your favorite examples in the comments section and take action to tell Mars, Mondelez, and Nestlé to shape up: www.behindthebrands.org/actnow

1. Remember Oreo mini-Cakesters? Yah me neither.

(Oreo mini-Cakesters, owned by Mondelez)

2. This product seems to have been named through a word-association game. “Quick say 5 words that will appeal to women. GO!”

(Skinny Cow Dreamy Clusters Candy, owned by Nestle)

3. Technically this Twix spot appears to be trying to reach men.  But never miss a chance to offend women in the process!

(Twix, Owned by Mars)

4. Wherein we show that ads can be condescending (and super awkward) in any language.

(Nestlé Grand Chocolat, owned by Nestle)

DOVE is really a repeat offender…

5. We pretend that these ads don’t make us want to hurl. We’re only human.

(Dove chocolate, owned by Mars)

6. Did you know that the smoke monster from Lost does endorsement deals…

(Dove chocolate, owned by Mars)

7. Or that he is a professionally trained dancer…

(Dove chocolate, owned by Mars)

8. Apparently he also knows how put the moves on.

(Dove chocolate, owned by Mars)

IN CONCLUSION.

9. Presented without comment, Stories from the Sweet life…

SPECIAL BONUS!

These Dove “Chocumentaries” manage to hit nearly every cliché about women and chocolate:

Photo: Creativos/Oxfam - click to enlarge

This week’s photo and story comes from Tjarda Muller, Oxfam communications officer in Central America.

Small-business owner Olga Alicia Pérez, pictured, lives in San Miguel Chicaj’, municipality of the department of Baja Verapaz in central Guatemala. “I make ice, jelly and fruit cocktails,” Pérez says. “Thank God, the business is doing well. My son studies and I am able to give him some money for a midday snack, or for the assignments he gets.”

Pérez is a member of an Oxfam Saving for Change group in her community, which helps her to keep her small business afloat. In Saving for Change, groups of 15 to 20 women combine their savings in a group fund. Members can borrow money from the fund to start or revive a small business, buy seeds and fertilizer for their land, or respond to an emergency. In Baja Verapaz, where 70 percent of the population lives in poverty, recurrent droughts as well as heavy rainfalls can devastate crops. Saving for Change provides an opportunity for women to lift themselves and their families out of these crisis situations.

“We fight; we struggle to save some money. This is a beautiful project. Many people in San Miguel Chicaj’ are involved now,” says Pérez.

The benefits of savings groups like these are now reaching far beyond Central America. Last week a group of international organizations, including Oxfam America, announced “50 by 2020,” an initiative to expand savings group membership globally from 6 million to 50 million by 2020.

Now that International Women’s Day is over, I’ll never feel the same way about M&M’s. Nor will I see Oreo cookies or Crunch bars in quite the same light. That’s because, for this March 8, we transformed the wrappers of these iconic products into a call to action on behalf of women cocoa farmers.

Why cocoa farmers? Although chocolate is a $100 billion industry, 90 percent of the world’s cocoa is grown by small-holder farmers in countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Millions of these farmers, especially women, live in poverty. Meanwhile, Oxfam’s Behind the Brands scorecard found that the world’s biggest chocolate companies could be doing a lot more for the women who grow this key ingredient.

At Oxfam, we believe that no company is too big to listen to its customers. So as the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, we called on consumers to send a message to three influential chocolate companies—Mars, Mondelez, and Nestlé—asking them to put policies in place to help women cocoa growers get a fair deal. To get the word out, we transformed some of these companies’ most famous products, and shared our versions, below, on social media.

Share this graphic on Facebook -  Share it on Pinterest - Tweet it

Share this graphic on Facebook - Share it on Pinterest - Tweet it

Share this graphic on Pinterest – Tweet it

Giant versions of these reimagined products also made an appearance at a snowy Times Square event at the M&M’s World store, and in front of Nestlé’s US headquarters in downtown LA, where the stormy skies parted just as Oxfam staffers and volunteers climbed into a human-sized “scales of justice” to stand in support of women cocoa farmers (see the photos at the top of this post). Oxfam Action Corps volunteers also handed out thousands of redesigned treats all over the country, from Austin, Texas, where the SXSW Festival was just beginning, to Seattle’s Pike Place Market.

Together, these efforts added up. On March 8 alone, more than 10,000 people signed our online petition. As of today, more than 30,000 people have taken action, and one company, Nestlé, has already shown that they’re listening.

Of course, we still have further to go to create real change for women cocoa farmers. But, for now, seeing some iconic brands in a new light could be a great place to start.

Photo: George Osodi for Panos / Oxfam America

In December, I traveled to southwestern Nigeria to talk with women cocoa farmers about their work and the conditions under which they grow the beans that become the chocolate so many of us here in the US crave—and sometimes pay plenty for. Someone’s got to be making a decent amount of money off those melt-in-your mouth truffles, don’t they?

Well, it’s not the women farmers, especially when you consider all the labor that’s required to nurture the cocoa trees, harvest the cocoa pods, extract the beans, and ferment and dry them for market. According to Oxfam’s research, less than 5 percent of the price of a typical chocolate bar goes back to cocoa farmers. And that makes me marvel even more at what women like Anna Iyiola, pictured above, are able to accomplish.

The portrait says a lot about her—the way she stands so strong, so sure. I admire the strength in her hands, the directness of her gaze. And I think about the answer she gave when I asked what she earns for a kilogram of beans:  320 Naira, or just more than $2.

“It isn’t at all a fair price,” said Iyiola.

She lives in Ayetoro-Ijesa, a small village that, until a few months ago, had no electricity and where there is no running water: People collect what they need to drink from a spring about a kilometer away.

Iyiola works on her own cocoa farm, about 1.5 acres in size. Her husband helped her get it going, but since then she has taken care of most of its operation—except for the hardest parts, like spraying to keep pests and fungus from attacking the trees and their pods. Her days are long, starting at 6 a.m. with household chores that include fetching water.

But cocoa farming and household responsibilities aren’t all that consume her time. Like many other Nigerians driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, Iyiola has more than one way of contributing to her family’s finances. She buys kola nuts and resells them at a local market that’s held weekly. Proceeds from that enterprise help fund operations on her cocoa farm.

But, perhaps, the greatest focus of her energy is her seven children and the future she is working hard to help them reach: all of them have graduated from, are in the middle of, or are waiting for admission to colleges and universities.

“My vision is to provide my children with an education so they can be empowered to be able to contribute to the progress of their own life,” said Iyiola.

Take action now to help women cocoa farmers achieve their dreams.

This blog post was written by Erin Gorman, CEO of Divine Chocolate, a 100 percent fair trade company owned in part by the farmers of the Kuapa Kokoo cooperative in Ghana. Oxfam America is partnering with Divine Chocolate for this year’s International Women’s Day celebration.

Christiana Adusei. Photo:Sophi Tranchell

Christiana Adusei, a 58-year-old cocoa farmer, sits with me in the cooperative’s meeting room in Kumasi watching the Ghana Black Stars play in the Africa Cup of Nations.  In two months she will be coming to the US, her first trip out of Ghana, to speak to consumers, businesses, and politicians about her life as a woman cocoa farmer.

Christiana, like so many women in cocoa, ‘’has it all” – all the household duties, the cooking, the cleaning, the farming of foodstuffs. They ensure children go to school and their health is looked after. They farm cocoa and do the drying and fermenting of beans.

Unlike most women in cocoa, Christiana is a member in her own right of a fair trade farmers’ cooperative. She joined Kuapa Kokoo with her husband 11 years ago, because she heard from other farmers that the organization was democratic and fair and that farmers received bonuses and a cutlass, which is among a cocoa farmer’s most prized tools.

About eight years ago she started as the secretary to the village recorder, the person who is elected by the village society to purchase its cocoa for Kuapa. She started training farmers to dry and ferment their cocoa properly so that it met Kuapa’s standards of good cocoa.

“I saw that I was a good teacher and that I could keep good records, and I decided that I should become a recorder myself,” Christiana said. At the elections she stood against the recorder, a man, and won. “Kuapa trained me that as a woman I could be a recorder and could be a leader in my society,” she said.

Cocoa farming is hard and to earn extra income Christiana raises grasscutters, a large rodent prized for its high-protein meat. The youngest of her seven children is still in school and Christiana wants to help her finish her education so the extra income helps. “I hope she will become a nurse and get a good job so she can help me in the future,” Christiana said.

Even though there isn’t a women’s group in her village, Christiana and other women still benefit from regional women’s empowerment trainings offered by Kuapa’s Gender Program. Kuapa instituted the program in 1998 as a response to the challenges so many women cocoa farmers face. The program trains women to take part in the cooperative leadership. Women learn skills to generate additional income, and can then access loans through Kuapa Kokoo’s credit union.

The three-pronged approach of building women’s confidence, skills training, and access to credit has hugely shaped Kuapa. Today 30 percent of the members are women farmers and the president of the cooperative is a woman.

We have a long way to go to make policy and practices work for women in small-scale agricultural production. Members like Christiana show us why it’s important to start trying to do more.

Take action to support women cocoa farmers around the world. Tell Mars, Mondelez, and Nestlé: The women who grow and pick cocoa deserve better.

What must it be like to know that your community is right around the corner, but conflict keeps you from coming home to your friends and family? In Mali, that’s the situation of 240,000 people in an area the size of Texas. Oxfam is reaching out to see how we can help them.

The complexity of three letters

In humanitarian terms, an internally-displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced from his or her home, usually due to natural disaster or conflict, and living temporarily in another area of his or her own country. That’s in contrast to a refugee, who is displaced to another country and cannot return home due to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” for a variety of reasons (race, religion, nationality, etc). IDPs on the other hand may have the same well-founded fear, but as they have not crossed an international border cannot avail themselves of the specific rights under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This international law prevents them from, among many things, being “involuntarily repatriated”—they can’t be forced to go home.

I thought recently about the complexity of those three letters – IDP – while speaking with my Senegalese colleague Habibatou Gogolo, Oxfam’s media and communications coordinator in Bamako, Mali. She had just returned from an assessment trip visiting IDP communities.

A focus group with the Oxfam assessment team Sévaré in Hotel des chauffeurs, Mali. In the site known as "Hotel des chauffeurs", local authorities provide accommodation for, according to them, 587 internally displaced persons (IDPs). Photo: Habibatou Gologo/Oxfam

She joined a team of Oxfam experts in water and sanitation services, food security, and civilian protection assessing how (or if) Oxfam can be of service in Sevare, a district of Mopti, which is on the border of southern and northern Mali. In February 2012, shortly after armed groups seized northern Mali, the first people fleeing their homes sought safety in Mopti. So the IDPs in Sevare are among the longest-standing homeless families in Mali.

Habibatou visited one “official” IDP camp that receives services from humanitarian organizations. There are still challenges, like clean water shortages and overcrowded toilets, but life on this site is relatively stable and safe from an outside perspective. Aid organizations distribute food regularly and women are washing clothes as they would at home, but if you look closely, Gogolo says it’s clear that life for these families has been turned upside down.

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Asewi Kuoaou is a member of a cocoa grower co-op in Yao, Ivory Coast. Photo by Peter DiCampo/Oxfam.

Are you on Instagram? If not, now might be a good time to sign up. This week, renowned photojournalists and curators of the Everyday Africa project, Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill, are taking over Oxfam America’s Instagram account!

You might remember hearing about the Everyday Africa project from us back in September. Originally, Peter and Austin teamed up to counteract the extreme media images of Africa by sharing photos from across the continent of the mundane and familiar, which are equally, if not more enthralling. Now their work has expanded to be featured in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The New York Times, and this week, The New Yorker.

They are posting photos (like the one above) from their recent trip to the Ivory Coast to learn about women cocoa farmers. In the Ivory Coast, like in many countries, women are responsible for the majority of food production, despite having limited access to markets, land, and credit. If women had equal access to resources, their efforts could reduce world hunger, lower child malnutrition, and raise the incomes of rural people around the world. As a part of Oxfam’s GROW campaign, we are working hard to ensure that rural farmers, especially women, have the ability to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

Follow us on Instagram at @OxfamAmerica to see all of their photos from the field.

Classmates Merline Jacques, right, and Soeurette Charles. “We’re really proud to be agricultural mechanics,” said Charles. Photo: Anna Fawcus/Oxfam America

When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in January, 2010, it shone a spotlight on the need to ease the dangerous overcrowding of the capital city of Port-au-Prince. So, after responding to the disaster with emergency programs, Oxfam shifted some of our focus to the countryside. Together with our partners, we ramped up our program to reinvigorate the rice economy of the Artibonite Valley, with the goals of reducing rural poverty, contributing to food security in Haiti, and—by making rice farming more viable—counteracting the continuous pull to migrate from the country to the city. As Oxfam’s Elizabeth Stevens reports, Haiti’s rice farmers are embracing the program and making it their own.

“Some of my women friends don’t like the idea of being in grease all day,” said Merline Jacques, a young woman I met in the town of Liancourt in the Artibonite Valley. But she doesn’t seem to mind.

Jacques is a pioneer—a woman setting out to become a professional mechanic in a country where such a thing is unheard of. She’s one of five female students in a class of forty who are taking a two-year course to learn not only mechanics but also a specialty within it: how to fix agricultural equipment.

“People have said that the Artibonite region alone could feed this whole country,” explained Chandelère Mayette, who helps run the course for an Oxfam partner. “But there’s a lack of technicians in agriculture.”

And that is costing farmers dearly. These days, getting a piece of equipment like a cultivator, rice mill, or irrigation pump fixed can take weeks, because the mechanics often have to be recruited from the Dominican Republic. A delay like that can ruin a season’s harvest, so training up young mechanics is an important part of strengthening the rice economy.

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