Planning
At the start of the project we decided to do a lot of research concerning the cocoa industry in Ghana. We found that this research was necessary to be able to understand the world where we dive into when we arrived in Ghana. These two months of doing research in The Netherlands helped us set goals to be accomplished by the end of the internship in Ghana.
However, when we had been working on the project for several weeks, we came to the conclusion that those goals were too global. Our project asked for a better structure that logically guides one through the report. We made a decision that our project consists of four chronological phases, of which one took place in Delft and the other three in Ghana.
The first phase is the research that was done to examine all facets of the cocoa industry. This part has not changed significantly. However, the goals have evolved into three new phases: Valorisation, Execution and Take-over. A visualisation of the planning can be seen in "Figure 9. Planning" on page ?1.
RESEARCH
The research phase serves three main targets. Collecting as much background information as possible, talking with several people who were already involved in the business and writing a proposal, which describes our work and goals for the upcoming three months in Ghana.
During the preparation in The Netherlands, the minor group has worked with full dedication for Farmerline. With many Skype meetings, together with mail contact there was tried to find a right way to set sails for the project.
Goals
After the research in Delft had been done, just before we flew, we set goals for our project in Ghana. We thought that those goals could help us to keep track of the progress we would make. Others, like Farmerline and TAHMO, could also see what we were doing. If one or more of those goals were not finished entirely by the time that we would be travelling back to The Netherlands, Farmerline could easily see what they should do in order to complete our activities.
The goals are related to the three key partners in the cocoa industry of Ghana: the LBCs, Cocobod and the cocoa farmers; The first goal was to have a meeting with the biggest eight LBCs of Ghana. As these LBCs account for almost 90% of the cocoa market [Asante, 2014], we thought that these LBCs could give us an accurate indication of the willingness to participate. A subsequent goal of these meetings was to build a database of contact information of these eight LBCs, so that Farmerline could follow up on us.
Next to the LBCs, we wanted to arrange a meeting with Cocobod to get a view of the industry from another perspective. And last but not least, we are concerned that having a conversation with a group of farmers is essential. The cocoa farmers are the consumers of the services of Farmerline and therefore it is important to have an overview of what plays a central part in their lives and what kind of struggles they face.
VALORISATION
During this phase the research information needed to be validated. This could be achieved by talking to several institutions. That was why a meeting with – The King of Cocoa – Cocobod could be very interesting, since Cocobod is very powerful and influential in every chain of the cocoa industry. Various meetings with LBCs were necessary to introduce the business model and the assets of Farmerline and meeting with cocoa farmers help to check if the information about them is correct.
EXECUTION
Due to the valorisation of all the gathered information, we knew what was correct and which aspects needed a change. The execution phase gives space to combine the confirmed information and to create business models for all three partners in the cocoa chain.
TAKE-OVER
The last phase is the take-over. This phase focuses on transferring all outcomes of the research to Farmerline. We explain which business models made in the execution phase could be feasible and are worth piloting for the company. Farmerline literally takes over the work where the minor group has finished.