Why Collaboration Is Hard—and Trust is Necessary
The challenge is that collaboration is often messy, slow and politically uncomfortable. It demands shared ownership among actors with varying perspectives, and asks companies to invest in communities beyond the borders of their own operations. Yet, in global supply chains, where climate vulnerability, rural poverty, and business risk intersect, partnerships are no longer a nice-to-have; they are the only route to lasting change. Stability comes from coordinated, long‑term partnerships that are built on trust, and that respect and strengthen the role of farming families.
Designing for Shared Outcomes
The Hershey Income Accelerator Program (HIAP) in Côte d’Ivoire is one example of this shift. HIAP is a farmer-centered program in Côte d’Ivoire that rewards cocoa farming households for taking positive actions at home and on their farm, with a goal to improve the economic and environmental resilience of cocoa farming families. While still in its earlier stages and not yet positioned to show long-term results, HIAP already reveals something important: when companies, NGOs, and local organisations design programs together rather than in parallel, the impact has the potential to extend beyond a single crop or geography. It can reshape how supply chains think about resilience, how communities pursue opportunity, and how businesses understand their role in rural livelihoods. HIAP brings together Hershey, CARE, Rainforest Alliance, and PUR to support cocoa-farming families, helping them to improve yields, strengthen climate resilience and create economic opportunities that extend beyond cocoa alone. But for all the technical interventions, the real story here is about people learning how to collaborate. And if more supply-chain sustainability programs adopted the kind of structure and intent that sit behind HIAP, corporate impact strategies might look very different over the next decade. Angela Tejada Chavez, Head of Sustainable Sourcing at The Hershey Company, told Sustainable Brands that the business case starts with a simple reality. “If farmers can’t make a living from cocoa, the whole system becomes vulnerable. You can’t have a resilient supply chain when the people at the foundation of it are struggling to meet basic needs.”
Creating Stability with Income Accelerators
Cocoa – from the trees to the beans to the drying racks – is still farmed largely by smallholders who carry much of the production risk and the least bargaining power. Income accelerators, Tejada Chavez argues, create resilience not only for families but for buyer companies who depend on a consistent, reliable and quality supply. The economics of cocoa, and the increasingly volatile climate surrounding it, make investment in farmers not charity, but strategy. Yet strategy alone doesn’t design a functional partnership.
Dr. Maria Hinson Tobin, Executive Director of Agribusiness Partnership at CARE, says the early stages of HIAP were a process of listening rather than building. “Before anything else, you have to understand what communities themselves identify as barriers,” she said. “A lot of programs fail because they start with solutions instead of with farmers.” This approach echoes CARE’s wider model: work with communities to surface their own priorities, then design interventions that strengthen the systems around them. In Côte d’Ivoire, those priorities include productivity training, climate-smart agriculture, access to finance, women’s economic empowerment, diversification of income, and better opportunities for farmers and their families.
One of the misconceptions about income accelerator programs is that they simply distribute cash. In reality, cash is only one component – and often a small one. The HIAP provides a longer and more established program, and the cash transfers in HIAP are used to incentivize the adoption of regenerative and yield-increasing farming practices that foster long-term productivity gains and support families in sending their children to school. The pairing of cash infusion with training, regenerative agriculture practices, agroforestry, support for women entrepreneurs, and community-level initiatives builds an ecosystem that enables long-term change and resilience. “It’s about helping families strengthen their economic position on multiple fronts,” adds Tobin. “Income is a piece of that. Dignity and opportunity are the bigger pieces.”
Building a Partnership with Clear, Complementary Roles
What makes HIAP notable at this early stage is not yet the outcomes but the architecture. Multi-stakeholder initiatives often collapse under their own weight, because they move slowly, suffer from unclear roles, duplicate efforts or get lost in reporting requirements that communities never see. This Hershey-led consortium made a point of building something different, built on trust and collaboration. Tejada Chavez describes the partnership as, “designed to minimise fragmentation and maximise complementarity,” with each organisation bringing expertise the others do not. CARE leads on community development and equality for women and girls. Rainforest Alliance contributes its experience in agronomy and individual farmer coaching. PUR focuses on agroforestry and climate resilience. Hershey, meanwhile, anchors the effort with investment, supply-chain access, and long-term commitment.
The partnership is also structured to allow for honest tension – something many collaborations avoid. “Good partnerships aren’t always comfortable,” Tejada Chavez notes. “You have to be willing to ask hard questions, share what’s not working and adjust in real time.” Tobin echoes this sentiment, describing regular joint reviews designed to question assumptions rather than simply tick boxes. When early feedback from farmers in one community suggested the training schedule conflicted with market days, the program adapted. When CARE identified that women entrepreneurs needed more tailored tools and training in addition to tailored farm planning, Rainforest Alliance and Hershey worked to integrate that into the design as well.
What’s striking is how relevant this model is beyond cocoa. Income instability is not unique to Côte d’Ivoire. Many global commodities – from coffee and tea to vanilla, palm oil and rubber – are produced by smallholders facing similar pressures: climate change, insecure land tenure, price volatility, limited access to finance and deeply entrenched gender inequalities. Tejada Chavez argues that income accelerators can be a “template for how companies think holistically about livelihoods in rural sourcing regions,” rather than focusing solely on certification, traceability or deforestation. If companies want resilient supply chains, they must invest in the people inside them. Tobin agrees, pointing out that the wider development sector has known for decades that climate adaptation and economic empowerment must be integrated rather than treated separately. What income accelerators offer is a bridge between development outcomes and business outcomes – a shared space where companies’ goals and community goals overlap. “There is no path to rural prosperity without collaboration,” she says. “And there is no path to sustainable supply chains without prosperous rural communities.”
Humility as a Strategy
Perhaps the most interesting insight from both Hershey and CARE is that successful partnerships demand trust and humility. Companies must resist the urge to lead every component. NGOs must understand corporate constraints and timelines. Local organisations must feel ownership, not token consultation. And the communities must shape the agenda rather than fit into one pre-written elsewhere. Many collaborations struggle because they fail to balance these dynamics. HIAP, at least in its early stages, is deliberately trying to get this balance right.
The test, of course, will be time. Farmer incomes, climate resilience and gender equality do not shift in a single season. The next few years will determine whether HIAP produces the type of tangible, long-term improvements that all partners hope for. But the early lesson is clear: when collaboration is intentional, transparent and rooted in community needs, companies can deliver something far more meaningful than compliance or charity. They can build systems that benefit everyone involved.
The opportunity now is to maintain momentum, scale what works, and ensure consistency so that progress is felt more widely. To this end, a progress report Hershey commissioned from Wageningen Social & Economic Research draws lessons from the initial phase to help successfully scale the program in the coming years.
What Comes Next
As more companies look to redesign their sustainability strategies, especially under pressure to demonstrate progress toward global targets that still feel out of reach, the question is no longer whether to collaborate but how. And as programs like HIAP continue to mature, they may just offer a blueprint.
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Published Feb 9, 2026 7am EST / 4am PST / 12pm GMT / 1pm CET