This week, the Ghana Cocoa Board (Cocobod) engaged European Union Ghana and GIZ. The engagement was “to present and discuss the scope and structure of the Cocoa Management System (CMS)”—a national database of cocoa farms and their owners.
Cocobod started CMS last year with the first tranche of a US$600 million syndicated loan secured from a consortium of international lenders led by the African Development Bank.
Hon JB Aidoo, the Chief Executive Officer of Cocobod, said the CMS is critical to enhancing traceability and sustainability of Ghana’s cocoa supply chain.
The CMS will also capture information about products and service providers, their capacities and pricing, with the ultimate goal of matching them with cocoa farms that need those products and services.
The board has collected around 1,000 farmers’ data and has issued Cocoa Identification Cards (CIC) to them.
The next step is to expand the database to cover the entire cocoa farming industry, comprising 673,377 identified farms, spread across 1,404,388.27 hectares of land, cultivated by approximately 800,000 households.
