Potable water for Akoti residents
More than 600 people at Akoti, a farming community near Suhum, and its environs now have access to potable water.
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Hitherto, the people had to fetch water from nearby streams which were mostly polluted.
However, through Nestlé Ghana’s Creating Shared Value (CSV) policy, the people now have access to potable water.
The Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Manager of Nestlé Ghana, Mr Aaron Fenu, who visited the community, said as part of Nestle’s efforts at ensuring that cocoa farmers were adequately catered for, it had introduced the Nestlé Cocoa Plan.
He said through the plan, more than 13,000 farmers had already been trained in good agricultural practices, while three schools and eight boreholes had been constructed in some cocoa-growing communities in the Eastern and Ashanti regions.
Mr Fenu was accompanied by some officials of Nestlé.
Nestlé Cocoa Plan
The Nestlé Cocoa Plan is an international initiative to improve the lives of cocoa farming communities and the quality of cocoa beans.
It aims at enabling farmers to run profitable farms, improve social conditions for the community and enable the long-term sourcing of good quality, sustainable cocoa for Nestlé products.
Nestlé has committed to source 150 000 tonnes of cocoa through the plan by 2017.
In Ghana, the plan is implemented in partnership with local buying companies such as Source Trust, ECOMS, Transmar and Noble Resource.
Village resource centres
Also, through the plan, the company has constructed four village resource centres (VRC) in Suhum, Akim Oda and Nkawkaw, where farmers and schoolchildren have access to computers.
The farmers at the resource centres learn new agricultural technologies and apply them on their farms, while the schoolchildren also use the centres to learn the basics of computer technology.
According to Mr Fenu, in all, 14,000 cocoa-growing community members had benefited from the Nestle Cocoa Plan programme.
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