Thank you to everyone who supported our first crowdfunder for the Chocolate Has A Name project. We reached our target and now have enough money to buy the equipment we need to set up the workshops. But we still need your help. Our partner DekoCraft is one of the few chocolate makers working in Accra - turning locally grown cocoa beans into locally made and consumed chocolate. They will train teachers to work the equipment and deliver chocolate making workshops to all the children who attend the school - now and in the future - meaning that the skills will be passed on from generation to generation.

Why is this important?

We all love chocolate. We give a box of chocolates as a gift for Mothers' Day, Valentine's Day, birthdays. We share a tin of chocolates at Christmas. But do do give enough thought to the people who grow the cocoa we love to eat? Do we know the names of these people? Because chocolate has a name, a story and a life.

70% of all the cocoa we eat is grown in West Africa, mostly Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. Tending, cultivating and harvesting cocoa is a highly skilled job, done by hand in high temperatures. Despite this, the average cocoa farmer earns just 74p a day.

In recent years great strides have been made in education in low income countries, and now over 90% of children - boys and girls - have six or seven years of education in almost all countries. We're partnering with Cocoa360 who run the Tarkwa Breman Girls' School to deliver this project. The 240 girls at the school are all the children of cocoa farmers. The grow up surrounded by cocoa pods, but many have no real sense of what those cocoa pods are used for. Their parents harvest and dry the cocoa beans, pack them into sacks and ship them to Europe to be made into chocolate. If they are lucky - like when we visited in February - they taste chocolate once a year.

We think these girls - and thousands more like them across West Africa - deserve to understand more about the importance of chocolate to their history and heritage, to understand the nutritional properties of cocoa and to see that there is more to working in the chocolate industry than just back breaking farming. We're helping these girls realise they have a future in cocoa. 

The school also offers a summer school for 180 boys who normally go to school further away. 

About this crowdfunder

Our first crowdfunder raised enough funds to buy the equipment for the project, but this equipment needs to be transported to the rural area in the Western Region of Ghana where the Tarkwa Breman school is situated. We will use some of the funds we raise now to transport the equipment and start building the workshop on site.

It costs £150 to train a teacher how to use the chocolate making equipment, to make chocolate and deliver the workshops to the children. We plan to train six teachers initially. 

Your donation will help with creating curriculum materials to build an educational programme around the history, geography, economics and nutritional value of cocoa. Once created this will be available for all schools in Ghana to use to teach children about the importance of cocoa to their communities. 

Monitoring and evaluation of the project is vitally important and we will work with partners to make sure the project is delivering on its aims.

Thank you to the fair trade brands who donated goods for our incentive packages - Tonys Chocolonely, JTS, Liberation Foods, Greater Goods, Thought clothing, Cafe Direct,

Longer term aims

This is a pilot project. There are schools all over Ghana and the rest of West Africa which could benefit from this project. We plan to expand to New Koforidua, the first Fair Trade Town in Africa and then to many other cocoa growing communities. The programme will ultimately be self sustaining with the help of partners in the fair trade and chocolate world.