The Nestlé Income Accelerator Program (hereafter, the Accelerator) offers a holistic, household-level approach to reducing the Living Income (LI) gap for cocoa farming households while addressing child labor risks. The interventions combine conditional cash transfers with in-kind support for children’s school enrollment, pruning cocoa trees, planting shade and fruit trees, and diversifying income sources beyond cocoa farming.

After one year of piloting in Côte d’Ivoire, which informed learning and adjustments to improve effectiveness and impact, the Accelerator was officially launched in 2022 with a test-at-scale phase that covered 9,401 cocoa-farming households. Two years later, the scale-up phase involved more than 30,000 cocoa-farming households, including about 2,000 in Ghana. In 2026, the Accelerator will continue expanding to reach approximately 45,000 households across Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.

Following recommendations in the KIT Institute’s 2025 annual progress report, the Accelerator’s implementation was simplified to improve its effectiveness. First, the Accelerator was re-centered on two core pillars (farm support and household support) rather than four. Second, without changing the total annual incentive amount, the number of transfers sent to eligible households was reduced from eight to four (see the figure below).

From the pilot phase to large-scale roll-out, KIT Institute is performing the following activities as the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) partner of the Accelerator:

• Developing and operationalizing the Theory of Change (ToC) of the Accelerator to identify and update relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) for MEL to help steer the program’s implementation.
• Building and running a continuous monitoring system that includes activity and output level data collected by the implementing parties (8 cocoa trading companies supplying Nestlé and other project partners like Rainforest Alliance and the International Cocoa Initiative).
• Conducting annual evaluation at outcome and impact levels (changes in socio-economic indicators such as household income from cocoa sales and non-cocoa income sources, women’s empowerment, household food security, resilience, and investment levels, and Living Income gap) using household surveys among Accelerator households and a comparison group.  A difference-in-differences strategy, coupled with matching techniques, is then used to robustly estimate the impact of the Accelerator on the livelihoods of cocoa-farming households. 
• Contextualizing the quantitative findings with qualitative insights collected during field observations, focus group discussions (FGDs), and open-ended interviews aimed at gathering the different views and perceptions of various actors involved in the Accelerator: cocoa producers, household members, and program partners and management.
• Identifying key research questions and emerging challenges to be addressed by the Accelerator (e.g., effects of adopting good agricultural practices on labor allocation and input use, take-up rates of technical training, and barriers for scaling up the income-generating activities outside cocoa farming). These topics are the subject of deep-dive studies that use a mix of existing quantitative data (from the monitoring system and the household survey) and qualitative data specifically collected to address the identified research question.
• Connecting different implementing organizations during learning events (impact management and reflect and adjust workshops) to disseminate results and recommendations, foster communication between stakeholders, and gather different perspectives and challenges related to the Accelerator’s implementation and impact.

In the news

• The economist – Why the African cocoa cartel is a bad idea
• The Times – Facing new laws, Nestlé offers £1bn to keep children out of chocolate trade
• The Financial Times – Nestlé pays to eliminate child labour from chocolate supply chain
• The Irish Examiner – Breaking new ground: KitKat company’s scheme improving the lives of west African cocoa-farming families