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Impacts and success stories
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Fair Trade producers' cooperative and the Fair Trade community project premium add up to a powerful local development tool. Fair Trade cooperatives provide economic empowerment to otherwise isolated farmers. It leads community initiatives and serves as a support group for any humanitarian organization project.
Fair Trade standards require that community projects be chosen through a democratic process. In many countries, this is often the members' first encounter with democracy, especially for women. Projects chosen by these cooperatives are highly diversified. They address health care & education services priorities, malnutrition and drinkable water
issues, reforestation, business development...
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For instance, the Kuapa Koto cooperative of Ghana, which provides our cocoa, decided to build 174 wells to save mothers an average 3 hours of water fetching per day.
As many more hours per day for farm work or children care.
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Being the most vulnerable members of the community, children are also the ones that benefit the most from its renewed prosperity. Fair Trade insures that no children under the age of 15 will be forced to miss school to work on the farm. But this does not mean they won't work at all. Some attempts to ban child labour entirely, for instance in the carpet waving industry, have lead to catastrophic results of children working in even harder underground conditions including prostitution. The Fair Trade approach is to keep family members together within a functional community.
Photo: © Éric St-Pierre
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