From October to December 2013, during the peak cocoa-harvesting season, the FLA conducted three unannounced independent external monitoring visits to two cooperatives in the Ivory Coast supplying to Olam.  Olam is a Tier 1 supplier of cocoa to Nestlé. Assessors selected three communities through stratified random sampling from two cooperatives supplying to Olam. A team consisting of both FLA staff and trained external assessors conducted the visits in Yamoussoukro, in the center of the Ivory Coast, and in Soubre, in the west, two of the country’s largest cocoa-producing regions.
Assessors visited a total of 60 farms (20 farms in each of the three communities). The team began by gathering information through desk-based research and meetings with external experts, community members, and civil society organizations in the two regions. Following their research, the team visited the cooperatives, conducting a total of 103 interviews. Assessors interviewed nine community members (eight men and one woman), four staff members at the cooperatives, 60 farmers (58 men and two women who own the cocoa plantations), and 30 adult seasonal workers and sharecroppers (26 men and four women who are engaged to work on the plantations by the farmers).