Why Collaboration Is Hard—and Trust is Necessary
The challenge is that collaboration is often messy, slow and politically uncomfortable. It demands shared ownership among actors with varying perspectives, and asks companies to invest in communities beyond the borders of their own operations. Yet, in global supply chains, where climate vulnerability, rural poverty, and business risk intersect, partnerships are no longer a nice-to-have; they are the only route to lasting change. Stability comes from coordinated, long‑term partnerships that are built on trust, and that respect and strengthen the role of farming families.
Designing for Shared Outcomes
The Hershey Income Accelerator Program (HIAP) in Côte d’Ivoire is one example of this shift. HIAP is a farmer-centered program in Côte d’Ivoire that rewards cocoa farming households for taking positive actions at home and on their farm, with a goal to improve the economic and environmental resilience of cocoa farming families. While still in its earlier stages and not yet positioned to show long-term results, HIAP already reveals something important: when companies, NGOs, and local organisations design programs together rather than in parallel, the impact has the potential to extend beyond a single crop or geography. It can reshape how supply chains think about resilience, how communities pursue opportunity, and how businesses understand their role in rural livelihoods. HIAP brings together Hershey, CARE, Rainforest Alliance, and PUR to support cocoa-farming families, helping them to improve yields, strengthen climate resilience and create economic opportunities that extend beyond cocoa alone. But for all the technical interventions, the real story here is about people learning how to collaborate. And if more supply-chain sustainability programs adopted the kind of structure and intent that sit behind HIAP, corporate impact strategies might look very different over the next decade. Angela Tejada Chavez, Head of Sustainable Sourcing at The Hershey Company, told Sustainable Brands that the business case starts with a simple reality. “If farmers can’t make a living from cocoa, the whole system becomes vulnerable. You can’t have a resilient supply chain when the people at the foundation of it are struggling to meet basic needs.”
Creating Stability with Income Accelerators
Cocoa – from the trees to the beans to the drying racks – is still farmed largely by smallholders who carry much of the production risk and the least bargaining power. Income accelerators, Tejada Chavez argues, create resilience not only for families but for buyer companies who depend on a consistent, reliable and quality supply. The economics of cocoa, and the increasingly volatile climate surrounding it, make investment in farmers not charity, but strategy. Yet strategy alone doesn’t design a functional partnership.
Dr. Maria Hinson Tobin, Executive Director of Agribusiness Partnership at CARE, says the early stages of HIAP were a process of listening rather than building. “Before anything else, you have to understand what communities themselves identify as barriers,” she said. “A lot of programs fail because they start with solutions instead of with farmers.” This approach echoes CARE’s wider model: work with communities to surface their own priorities, then design interventions that strengthen the systems around them. In Côte d’Ivoire, those priorities include productivity training, climate-smart agriculture, access to finance, women’s economic empowerment, diversification of income, and better opportunities for farmers and their families.
One of the misconceptions about income accelerator programs is that they simply distribute cash. In reality, cash is only one component – and often a small one. The HIAP provides a longer and more established program, and the cash transfers in HIAP are used to incentivize the adoption of regenerative and yield-increasing farming practices that foster long-term productivity gains and support families in sending their children to school. The pairing of cash infusion with training, regenerative agriculture practices, agroforestry, support for women entrepreneurs, and community-level initiatives builds an ecosystem that enables long-term change and resilience.