To increase the productivity output of smallholder cocoa farmers using environmentally sustainable methods, to increase incomes for marginal rural people in Indonesia. The partnership leverages MARS Chocolate's technical knowledge and capacity, the Government of Indonesia's convening capacity and rural reach, and IFAD's brokering, finance and monitoring capacity.

The partnership is one of the first public-private-partnerships in the agriculture sector in Indonesia and had transformative character. Following a period of trust building and strong facilitation by IFAD, the partnership delivered substantive results, building on each partners' strengths and key competencies: MARS Chocolate delivered state of the art technical knowledge on cocoa production and farm management via a 'cocoa academy', the Ministry of Agriculture brought the outreach to farmers in remote areas with low infrastructure – a key element given that this remoteness makes it difficult for MARS to expand operations by themselves, and IFAD convening the partnership, facilitation and continuous follow up needed to ensure concrete collaboration. Results were convincing, triggering a high interest within the Government of Indonesia to explore similar public-private partnerships within other agricultural commodities and scale up the existing partnership with MARS. The Rural Empowerment and Agricultural Development Project (READ), financed and supervised by IFAD and implemented by MoA operated in South Sulawesi, Indonesia’s main cocoa production area - and home to MARS’ cocoa academy. Project results were far from satisfactory however. Technical capacity support to cocoa farmers had been underperforming. Rather than observing an increase in production, IFAD noticed that more and more farmers were cutting down the trees and replanting other crops as they simply could not make enough money from their cocoa farms. At this stage, IFAD brought MARS chocolate to provide technical training to READ cocoa farmers. The partnership achieved significant results: including that READ cocoa farmers achieved 193% higher yields than non-READ farmers, much of which can be attributed to higher capacity technical support. Under a newly designed follow-up project, the MARS partnership will continue and expand in geographic location and activities. In this second phase the partners also intend to launch an e-platform around cocoa training in order to share the knowledge with a larger target group. Going even a step further towards systemic change, MARS will also this time train Government extension officers and educationalists in cocoa agronomy in order to strengthen the capacity of the public sector to deliver vital high-level technical assistance in the long term. MoA is also collaborating with MARS on the revision of the curricula of the national cocoa vocational school programs, building on the lessons of a MARS pilot programme.

Human resource development for advanced cocoa production and business expertise for larger numbers of public and private sector cocoa professionals in Sulawesi. This is expected to have two elements: (i) direct professional training of government extension workers, lead farmers and others at the MARS Cocoa Academy; (ii) development and roll-out of improved cocoa production and business courses at technical and vocational education training centres and Agricultural Training Centres in Sulawesi guided by MARS Cocoa Academy expertise; (b) Piloting of improved business models for sustainable operation of the CDC’s established in Central Sulawesi under READ, especially for financial sustainability; (c) e-Cocoa training and advisory system development; (d) Accelerated cross-learning between MARS and READ SI field approaches, through READ SI working in selected districts in South Sulawesi co-located with MARS' own managed CDCs and cocoa sourcing operations. In addition to these four main pillars of the partnership, both READ SI and MARS share a common interest to explore and pilot innovative cocoa financing schemes to support orchard rehabilitation and/or replanting. It is recognized by MARS and READ SI that financing for farmers to rehabilitate their aging orchards is vital to rejuvenating the cocoa industry in much of Sulawesi. However, it is also recognized that it is a complex problem due to the timescales and amounts of financing required by a typical small farmer. While the problems are substantial, both READ SI and MARS are keen to collaborate to see if they can begin to make progress in this area. Parties will continue to investigate this with a view to jointly piloting activities if suitable opportunities arise.

The partners commit time and energy to establishing clear and effective mechanisms for jointly managing the partnership, including clear decision making authorities on each side and clear and efficient mechanism for resolving issues or under-performance that may arise from time to time and is a natural part of any partnership. To do so, a system of regular Partnership Performance Meetings are adopted under the partnership.There are quarterly partnership progress meetings involving senior managers from MARS, MoA and its implementing partners (including the community mobilization NGO). Further, there are designated senior representatives from each partner who attend the meetings, and that have decision making authority for the issues to be discussed on behalf of their respective institution to allow for efficient operation of the partnership.

MARS cocoa, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Government of Indonesia