Exploring farmer-driven approaches for sustainable cocoa livelihoods in Côte d’Ivoire

The Ivorian cocoa sector faces numerous socio-economic and environmental challenges, including widespread poverty among smallholder farmers. Over decades, multiple approaches have been adopted to address these challenges, often top-down and outcome-based in their design. This study applied a Positive Deviance (PD) approach to explore strategies employed by innovative Ivorian cocoa farming households to identify and learn from locally developed solutions. Analysing data from 303 Ivorian cocoa households, 16 PD households were selected for follow-up in-depth interviews. Key strategies identified among these households included income diversification, the use of organic fertilizers like compost and animal manure, and maintaining diversified plantations and dry-season crops to enhance household resilience. While these practices are not entirely new to the Ivorian context, their strategic combination and anticipation of specific challenges appears to be key to their success. However, their adoption was often depending on the households’ access to resources, such as land and labour, limiting their generalizability across all smallholder farmers. The study therefore highlights the need for context-specific approaches to support smallholder farmers and argues for tailored and locally grounded development interventions. Given the critical role that cooperatives play in facilitating access to inputs, knowledge, and credit, they should be strengthened, particularly in their capacity to reach underserved groups. While these exploratory findings offer valuable insights into local innovations and trade-offs within the cocoa sector, future research should incorporate more quantitative data on household income streams to better understand the broader applicability and trade-offs of these strategies.