Kuapa Kokoo kids come to UK
Joycelen Segbedzi and Stephen Amankwah are in the UK to talk about the benefits that their families have gained from Fairtrade. People & Planet caught up with Joycelen in Birmingham.
Joycelen Segbedzi
Kuapa Kokoo is a Fairtrade co-operative of 45,000 cocoa farmers from around 1,200 villages across Ghana. It co-owns the UK chocolate company, Divine.
Joycelen and Stephen come from New Koforidua, a small community about 30km to the east of Kumasi, the second largest city in Ghana where Kuapa Kokoo HQ is based. Cocoa farming has long been in their families, and since the creation of Divine in 1997 they have witnessed many benefits. They are currently touring the UK with the Fairtrade Foundation at Fairtrade Schools Conferences in Glasgow, Birmingham and London.
Joycelen told us that there are about seventy students at her school, with three classrooms and five teachers. All the learning materials are provided thanks to Kuapa Kokoo’s Fairtrade certification, while the Ghanain Government pays for school fees. School is free up to the age of 14; then for Senior High School it costs £340 per term.
There are only ten students in Joycelyn’s class — they have been selected as the brightest bunch. The other classes with less able students have more people in them. The whole school works in English and the students are punished — told to kneel down or pay a fine — if they speak their own language, even at break time. Joycelen said that she didn’t mind this and that English was her favourite subject because it meant that she could speak to us in the UK about the benefits of Fairtrade.
Everyone in Joycelen’s community works in cocoa production so she knows quite a bit about that too! When it is harvested, the cocoa beans come out of the pod covered in white stuff that is sweet but soon becomes bitter when it dries. In Ghana, the cocoa beans are nothing like chocolate — they are much too bitter. They can be roasted and mashed for use in other dishes. The farmers leave the beans for one week to ferment and dry, and the empty pods are used to make soap. So nothing gets wasted!
The community decided to spend some of the Fairtrade premium on a Summer Camp where children from different villages and schools meet to take drama classes and learn about teenage pregnancies and HIV/AIDS.
Before she came to Birmingham, Joycelyn visited a Thai restaurant in London and didn’t eat any of the food as she found it far too sweet. Chinese food, on the other hand, is a lot like Ghanain food so Joycelen likes that very much - especially egg-fried rice!
Joycelen and Stephen are returning to Ghana after the London Fairtrade Schools Conference on 18 June.