Empowering Ghana’s young entrepreneur farmers to start cocoa farms

CocoaLink is a smart application that was developed by Farmerline a Ghanaian social enterprise on a mission to leverage technology that would empower smallholder farmers to improve their productivity.

The CocoaLink app was developed with the aim of encouraging youth to pursue agriculture as a profitable income generating venture. With content in the form of text, audio bits and videos, the Android-based smartphone application is ideal for anyone who wants to learn about cultivating a profitable cocoa farm. Users get the chance to test their knowledge on what they have learned through the app with quizzes.

Through Facebook Messenger, users with non-android devices can read CocoaLink articles and take quizzes by interacting with the Farm Assistant BOT, an abridged version of the CocoaLink app. Upon searching “FarmAssistant” in the Messenger application, Facebook users can read articles and take quizzes to learn more about profitable cocoa farming.

The ultimate goal of CocoaLink is to develop young entrepreneurs who will harness the power of information in the agricultural space to empower their communities.

As part of the marketing activities for the CocoaLink App and the goal of nudging young people to start farming, we seek to expose young people to the realities of running a cocoa farm. We are carrying this out through our Farm Field Days. The first Farm Field Day was held on 30th June. Following social media posts on Facebook and Twitter, thirty-two young people (6 females and 26 males) were selected to visit two cocoa farms in an all-expense paid trip to Kyekyewere, in the Ashanti Region.

To select participants, interested parties had to invite a minimum of two friends to download and use the app using a unique referral code provided on the app. The participants were split into 2 groups to learn about cocoa growing from two cocoa farmers who have a long-standing relationship with Farmerline.

To encourage female participation, we are working with the female participants of the maiden edition of the Farm Field Day to admonish their fellow young ladies to use the app and participate in our upcoming events.

The experiences of the young people during the Farm Field Day were captured in this video

Download CocoaLink from the Google Playstore.

Photo credit: Guy Mullins (Flickr user)