Gender Inequality in the Cocoa Supply Chain: Evidence from Smallholder Production in Ecuador and Uganda

Most cocoa is grown by smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend largely on the income from cocoa. Today, cocoa production must increasingly comply with social and environmental requirements as the worldwide demand for sustainably produced cocoa is growing steadily. There is, however, insufficient information available on whether the sourced cocoa is produced under gender-equitable conditions. We address this by examining two cocoa supply chains using our own sex-disaggregated survey data from producing communities in Ecuador and Uganda that supply the Swiss market, using descriptive and inferential statistics. Our results show that women in Uganda were highly involved in cocoa production on both male and female managed farms, but their decision-making power was limited to female managed farms. In Ecuador, women were moderately engaged in decision-making yet participated less in cocoa production. Our log-linear regression analyses for both cases showed substantial differences in annual cocoa revenues of farms managed by women compared to those managed by men. Several socio-economic and agronomic factors for which women face structural inequalities largely explain the revenue gap, such as poorer access to productive resources. Indeed, our findings suggest that cocoa production is characterised by high levels of gender inequality, suggesting that private and public sustainability efforts do not sufficiently address gender discrimination. These findings can help design interventions for more gender-equitable rural development that address the complexity of disadvantages in the local context. Offering gender-specific trainings within private programs and promoting women's access to credit by the public sector represent first steps towards gender equality.