Cocoa Diaries Update: Tragedy; Meeting with Alex Assanvo; Cocoa Documentary Collab; Meeting with Business and Financial Times Editor, etc.
Dear Readers
I trust you are all well. Happy new year to you all. It’s my wish that we grow from strength to strength and become a positive force in the world. Today I have a bitter-sweet update for readers. But first of all, it’s been three years since I visited my parents in Ghana. So taking two months out to stay with my mum (who isn’t feeling well) was the best thing that ever happened to me. A single mum brought me up. Her determination for her three boys (me being the second born) to be something more than her has brought me this far. So I don’t play with my mum at all.
If you have come from a poor home, you do a million things simultaneously to raise enough funds to care for your family and siblings. I have had to do this since grade two: sell iced water and consumer goods on the streets of Kumasi, through to gaining a fully funded Scholarship to pursue a Masters Degree at the University of Manchester. So I am not a rich, entitled child fighting for the rights of cocoa farmers to achieve my self-actualisation needs, but a poor child raised by a single mother who knows what it feels like to be poor and actively wants to meaningfully contribute to making the world a better place.
Personal Tragedy
2022 and 2023 have been difficult years for me. My mum has not been well for about two years now. So I went to Ghana to stay with her for two months, sending her from one specialist to the other. But I am happy her health is improving. A day before my planned departure from Kumasi to Accra, our house burnt down to Ashes. Ghana Fire Services has yet to provide us with a report (which we will never get as usual) after their investigation. Still, I appreciated their timely arrival when we called on them to quench the fire. So we do not know precisely what caused the fire. However, we know that everything in our house got burnt to ashes. As shown in the picture, the remaining structure is weakened by the fire to the point where we need to rebuild from the ground up.
This house is very dear to my heart because it was built after more than decades of consolidating the cocoa revenue of my mum and her five other sisters. They accumulated these cocoa revenues for years until we built this house. This has been the city house where everyone in our extended family that wanted their children to gain city education or life has had to settle in to achieve that.
This house allowed my mum to show me the opportunities I have been able to exploit, so that today I can write for your reading. I wish to support this house's building to afford similar opportunities to other youth in my family.
So if you would like to support me in rebuilding the house for my family, you can donate to my Paypal via asamoahpeters@gmail.com.
Meeting with The Executive Director of Cote D’Ivoire Ghana Cocoa Initiative
I paid a courtesy call to the Executive Director of the Cote D'Ivoire Ghana Cocoa Initiative (CDGCI), Mr Alex Assanvo and his colleagues in their Accra Office. The CDGCI is the institution jointly established by the Governments of Cote Divoire and Ghana to advise on implementing the Living Income Differential. The purpose of my visit was first to develop relations and discuss how Cocoa Diaries can work together to advance a positive change that is potent in sustaining the livelihoods of Cocoa Farmers in Ghana. We also advised on the need for independent and citizen journalists like Cocoa Diaries to be granted a seat at decision-making tables and meaningful discussions about the sector. Also, we asked for transparency in the work of the CDGCI, with the starting point being sharing information with independent media like the Cocoa Diaries for our analysis, critique and reporting. I am very grateful to colleagues in the CDGCI office for making this meeting possible and to Mr Alex Assanvo for spending more than an hour with me discussing how the sector/industry can be improved.
Meeting with The Editor of the Business and Financial Times
The Business and Financial Times (B&FT) has been very instrumental in widening the reach of Cocoa Diaries reporting in Ghana. When most Newspapers in Ghana I wrote to refused to even respond to my email, the B&FT Editor did. Mr William Adjadogo. He and his team have been very graceful and supportive of my work, even when Big people at FAirtrade have pushed back at them for my reporting on them. So I paid a courtesy call to Mr Adhadogo, B&FT Editor in their Accra office, to chat about ways to improve our collaboration and increase Cocoa Diaries exposure to ensure a lot more Ghanaians gain the understanding they currently are not fed with about the cocoa-chocolate industry.
Cocoa Documentary Collaboration
I have also been advising on a Cocoa-Chocolate industry documentary being shot in Ghana and Switzerland. So while in Ghana, parts of the documentary that required my appearance and voice were filmed—looking forward to its reveal in 2024. I will keep you all updated.
So I will take some days off to keep an eye on my mum’s health for sometime, help bring them some comfort. On the other hand, I have a few articles in draft, hoping to finish it soon.
Thank you for your kind support as always.