Ghana's cocoa farmers are protecting forests — and earning 80% more doing it

Susana Afrifa Ankrah can tell you exactly how much joining a forest-protection programme changed her life. She pauses, calculates, then grins: about 80%. That is how much her income has grown since she signed up to a scheme that asks cocoa farmers in Ghana's Atewa Range to stop clearing trees — and teaches them why they never needed to.

The Atewa Range, in south-eastern Ghana, holds one of West Africa's most biodiverse surviving fragments of tropical forest. Eagle owls, rare cuckoos, colobus monkeys and the giant swallowtail butterfly — which carries the widest wingspan in the world — all live here. So does Susana: mother, grandmother, and now a community leader in the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme (GCFRP), a joint initiative of Ghana's Forestry Commission and its Cocoa Board, backed by the United Nations and channelling finance through the World Bank.

The forest gives us fresh air. It cools the land. It helps the rains to fall. And if the rains are falling, then the crops will do well and we know everything will be fine.— Susana Afrifa Ankrah, cocoa farmer and community leader, Atewa Range

The logic of the programme cuts against a pattern that has driven deforestation across Ghana for generations. Cocoa is a key export industry and a major source of income for farmers in once-forested areas. When yields fell or land was exhausted, farmers would move on — clearing and burning new forest to start again. The GCFRP, launched in 2019, set out to break that cycle by making the forest more valuable standing than felled.

REDD+ — Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation — is the international framework that makes this possible. Rich-world countries and corporations pay into a fund, administered via the World Bank, which flows to forest nations in return for measurable progress on curbing forest loss. Ghana's programme identified a number of Hotspot Intervention Areas, chosen for their threatened forest cover and the potential for local communities to make a difference.

When programme representatives arrived in Susana's community shortly after the 2019 launch, she did not hesitate.

I thought: 'Hey! This is a good initiative for me. I will not waste my time – I will get involved.'— Susana Afrifa Ankrah, cocoa farmer and community leader, Atewa Range

What she learned reshaped how she farms. The programme trains participants in organic fertilisers and composting to improve soil health, supplies specially bred hybrid seeds that thrive under a tree canopy, and promotes 'agroforestry' — planting native trees such as African mahogany between cocoa crops. Shade-grown cocoa, it turns out, is not a compromise: cocoa is a forest plant in its natural state, and Susana says her plants do better out of direct sun. 'They thrive when they're not exposed to the sun,' she told Positive News.

The programme also pushed her to diversify. She now grows peppers, pawpaw, plantain and cassava alongside her cocoa, and has taken up beekeeping, pig-rearing and snail farming. With business advice from the scheme, she has set up a daycare nursery and a bakery, employing 17 workers. The practical support runs from the mundane to the meaningful — cutlasses, sprayers, boots and knapsacks — but the cumulative effect on her household finances has been transformative.

Schemes that channel climate finance from wealthy nations to poorer ones can attract criticism for effectively outsourcing environmental responsibility. But experts say this programme is learning from earlier failures. Dua Zehra, who leads the Thriving Forests programme at climate solutions charity Ashden, points to the Kariba scheme in Zimbabwe as a cautionary tale — one that 'went horribly wrong because it overlooked community rights'. The GCFRP's approach, by contrast, centres community consultation and what Zehra describes as genuine 'free, prior and informed consent.'

There's growing evidence that putting local communities at the heart of efforts to protect forests produces the best results.— Dua Zehra, Thriving Forests programme lead, Ashden

Similar community-centred approaches are being tested across Africa — from Kenya's degraded rangelands to Senegal's mangrove coasts — suggesting the model has potential well beyond Ghana's cocoa belt. Younger generations are being drawn back to farming rather than leaving for cities, helping sustain rural communities and pass land stewardship to the next generation.

The Atewa Range, however, still faces serious pressure. Illegal logging and mining remain active threats, and a large bauxite project near the forest has drawn concern from conservationists. The programme's long-term impact will depend on whether those external threats can be contained — and whether REDD+ continues to tighten its rules on community rights as it scales.

For Susana, the case is already made. The forest that cools her land, brings the rains and supplies the local herbalists with remedies for malaria and diabetes is still there — and so is her livelihood, larger than it has ever been.

Why it matters — The programme offers evidence that conservation and poverty reduction need not compete — but its long-term success depends on tackling ongoing threats from logging and mining that no amount of agroforestry training can address alone.

Reported by positive.news, impactful.ninja