Ghana Case Study: Communicating With Cocoa Farmers

Cocoa Farmer Profile
Cocoa farmers are a well-defined subset of Ghana’s agricultural sector. Three quarters of the survey respondents who said they grew cocoa as one of their primary crops in the last year lived in the Western, Ashanti, or Central regions. Farmers who grew cocoa were more likely than other crop farmers to be men (62 percent of cocoa farmers versus 52 percent of other farmers), live in urban areas despite considering farming a significant source of income (22 percent of cocoa farmers versus 15 percent of other farmers), to be wealthier and to have some formal education (see Charts 1 and 2).

Chart 1
        

Chart 2
        

Cocoa farmers were more likely to say they had household access to a radio, TV, or computer (but they had similar levels of access to mobile and landline phones, the internet, and MP3 players). However, access rates were not so much higher that they could (statistically, at least) fully explain cocoa farmers’ higher weekly use of multiple sources for general news and information (see Chart 3).

Chart 3
    

Interestingly, although cocoa farmers were on average less reliant on word-of-mouth sources for getting general news, they were twice as likely as other farmers to say that people come to them very often for news and information about farming (13 percent of cocoa farmers, compared to 6 percent of other farmers). In other words, they are still an important part of word-of-mouth networks even though they do not rely as heavily on word-of-mouth information as a source of news.

Friends and family still play a large role for all crop farmers in getting critical information about markets and prices, perhaps because more formal information on these topics is hard to come by. Even for farmers who grow a key cash crop such as cocoa, friends and family are the second most popular source of information about markets and prices, behind radio (and neither source alone reaches more than half of cocoa farmers; See Chart 4).

Chart 4
    

Cocoa farmers were significantly more likely than other crop farmers to say they received information about business issues (See Charts 4-5), which likely reflects cocoa’s status as a particularly active cash crop. Cocoa farmers were also more likely to be satisfied with the information available to them about business topics. Cocoa farmers’ higher exposure and their higher satisfaction with agricultural information could be explained by many factors, including a tendency to listen to the radio more regularly for news in general, or because agricultural support from extension offices and farmers’ organizations (including cooperatives and farmers’ unions) is more targeted toward the type of farming they practice. If they are indeed more satisfied because their needs are better served, this suggests a gap in providing agricultural information that satisfies those farmers outside the cocoa market.

Chart 5
      

Chart 6
    
 
The data thus provide guidance to development organizations involved in sharing or delivering information with farmers about business issues:

• The communication gap in business issues, which was identified among all farmers, appears to be more severe among farmers outside of the cocoa market. This communication gap would need to be filled if supporters of agricultural outreach were seeking to diversify farmers’ livelihoods with other cash crops. One promising tool would be television, which was already used on a weekly basis for general news by about half of all farmers, but was not cited by nearly as many farmers as a source of information about markets, financing, or legal issues in agriculture.
• Another approach would be to draw from cocoa farmers’ more positive experience (higher exposure, and higher satisfaction) by encouraging their key sources—including radio, extension agents and farmers’ organizations—to target the needs of farmers more broadly, outside of the already active cocoa market
• Finally, as mentioned in the Information Sources for Agriculture section above, SMS messages were not cited as a source of agricultural information by farmers, whether or not they grew cocoa. With over 60 percent of all farmers having access to a mobile phone, this represents an as-yet-untapped source of communication about agriculture in general, and cash crops in particular.
  
  
  
  

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[1] In this case study, the term “farmer” refers to survey respondents who said that farming contributed substantially to their household income in the last year. The term “cocoa farmer” refers to farmers who listed cocoa when asked to list up to three crops they typically grew and had grown in the last year.