Low incomes continue to be a root cause of some of the most persistent problems in many agricultural commodity sectors. To find practical, innovative, and cost-effective ways to support cocoa farming households towards Living Income, the Netherlands-based commodity trading company Export Trading Group (ETG) and its sustainability office, the Beyond Beans Foundation (BBF), in partnership with Oxfam Novib and KIT Institute, launched a pilot project called EnRoute.

During Phase A of this project (2021-2022), KIT conducted a baseline assessment of the Living Income (LI) and Child Labour (CL) risks situation among 250 households of the Man and Daloa regions in Côte d’Ivoire and 400 households in the Plateaux region in Togo. Results showed large LI gaps (above US$ 4,000 per year on average) and high prevalence of CL (52 to 63% depending on the region). Simultaneously, KIT and Oxfam Novib identified a set of holistic interventions aimed at addressing the key drivers of households’ LI gaps and the prevalence of CL.

In Phase B (2023-2025), in Côte d’Ivoire, the EnRoute programme was structured as a pilot to assess which set of interventions among the following is the most effective in closing LI gaps and reducing CL prevalence:

1. Cash Only – An unconditional cash transfer totalling €400 for two years (equally split between spouses) paired with a two-month Empowering Better Decision-Making (EBDM) training to boost gender-equitable decision-making.
2. Services Only – Farm-level (subsidized pruning, agroforestry, coaching) and community-level (establishment of VSLAs, and GALS/financial management training) services aimed at boosting agricultural productivity, tackling labour availability issues, and supporting income diversification.
3. Cash & Services – A combination of the previous two packages to test whether offering them together generates effects greater than the sum of the effects generated by the individual packages.

These packages were randomly assigned to participating villages, allowing KIT to conduct an endline evaluation of the programme’s impact using the data from 565 households (including a comparison group which did not receive any intervention apart from the mandatory CL sensitisation conducted by BBF).

In Togo, the differences in the context (e.g., separated cocoa and coffee areas, limited sustainability efforts compared to Cote d’Ivoire) and the absence of a LI benchmark at the time of the baseline required several adjustments. The program, renamed Midjo, mainly consisted of the service interventions, while, in addition to the endline evaluation, KIT’s activities also involved researching and adjusting the potential LI benchmarks that could be developed for Togo. Therefore, a comparative review of the publicly available benchmarking methodologies was conducted, leading to the development of a lean approach for updating the LI and LW benchmarks published for Togo in 2023. The endline evaluation of the project will take place in the summer of 2026.