SCALE: UNLOCKING INNOVATIVE FINANCING FOR EDUCATION THROUGH COLLABORATION
SCALE is a collaborative co-funding mechanism supported by three philanthropic partners and 10 cocoa and chocolate companies, including Mondelēz International (MDLZ). Together, we are injecting further funds into the Ghana Accountability for Learning Outcomes Project (GALOP) initiative, a five-year governmental initiative seeking to improve the quality of education in low-performing basic education schools and strengthen the education sector across the country. The initiative aims to enhance teaching capacity, accountability, leadership systems, access to high-quality resources, and operational management.
Through the SCALE initiative, private and philanthropic organizations have for the first time raised enough finance to trigger the Global Partnership for Education’s (GPE) Multiplier Grant in Ghana. By pooling US$40 million, SCALE partners unlocked an additional US$40 million from GPE to support GALOP, showcasing the power of collaboration in unlocking innovative financing to promote systemic change.
Through MDLZ’s Cocoa Life program in Ghana, we are already collaborating with district assemblies and education directorates to help implement education improvement projects tailored to the local needs of cocoa communities. It is our hope that SCALE will reach many more districts that may not directly benefit from the current projects. We see this partnership as a model of how to replicate a strategy to successfully expand into other cocoa-growing areas.
COCOA LIFE’S INTEGRATED APPROACH TO HELP COMBAT CHILD LABOR
The ambition of the SCALE initiative aligns with Cocoa Life’s Strategy to Help Protect Children, through which the program takes a systems approach to help enhance child protection systems and help improve access to quality education in Cocoa Life communities. The strategy focuses on three primary areas of response: prevention efforts to help combat the underlying causes of child labor; monitoring and remediation through Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) and helping to enable systemic solutions.
At the heart of our strategy is the realization that helping to address child labor is a shared efforts, needing the collaboration of governments, suppliers, communities, NGOs, peer companies, and multi-sector partners. Multi-stakeholder partnerships have the potential to strengthen existing local systems that alleviate the underlying root causes of child labor, including access to quality education. Therefore, SCALE represents an exciting opportunity to further promote progress in this critical area of focus for us.
Beyond SCALE, Cocoa Life’s integrated approach continues to help protect children through prevention, monitoring, and remediation efforts. In 2024, we scaled the CLMRS to cover ~89% of Cocoa Life communities (or 2,480 communities) in West Africa with a CLMRS, progressing further towards our goal to cover all West African Cocoa Life communities with a CLMRS by the end of 2025 . Through this expanded coverage, 240,000 interviews were conducted by our CLMRS to help prevent child labor . In parallel, we continued our efforts to enhance the quality of implementation of our CLMRS.
