General Assembly of the African Cocoa Platform in Côte d'Ivoire

An article by Susanne Bercher-Hiss and Maike Winter

From 29th to 30th November 2022, the General Assembly of the African Cocoa Platform was held in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. The Platform is a non-formal network established in 2018 under the initiative of GIZ and the Green Innovation Centres Project (ProCIV) to strengthen exchanges between the cocoa producing countries of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo and Cameroon. Through the platform, a technical exchange on a sustainable cocoa sector takes place between the 5 member countries.  Members are governments and actors from civil society and the private sector as well as smallholders and smallholder farmers.

The conference was attended by more than 60 participants, including representatives of ONCC (Cameroon), CCC (Cote d'Ivoire), CFCC (Togo) and COCOBOD (Ghana) as well as cocoa farmers and representatives of chocolate manufacturers and cocoa cooperatives. One of the topics was the anchoring of the African cocoa platform, "The platform must survive", it rang through the room. Furthermore, there were technical contributions on the various innovations of the member countries, the innovation database cocoinnovations.net, on national traceability systems and their implementation, on the agroforestry competition. We thank all 60 participants for this exciting exchange!