Brought together by Mars, Inc. in April 2007, the iMPACT partnership is a collaborative social, economic and environmental development program, specifically targeted to assist cocoa growing communities in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

ICI, together with five other development partners (Africare, the International Foundation for Education and Self-Help, Rainforest Alliance, the Sustainable Tree Crops Program and the German development agency, GTZ), is part of this international group. The partnership works at the community level to make a sustainable improvement in the lives of cocoa farming communities. Concretely, ICI local implementing partners support the efforts of 26 iMPACT communities in creating development action plans that they lead and that the iMPACT partners support at community level. This combined effort addresses the underlying causes of the worst forms of child labour and forced labour.

In Novembre 2008, senior managers from Mars, including their ICI Board member, Ingmar Streese, had the opportunity to visit Ghana and to meet key stakeholders. After a conference with representatives from all iMPACT partners, representatives of the Ghana Cocoa Board and of the Ministry of Manpower, Youth and Employment (MMYE), visited cocoa growing communities. According to Alastair Child, (Global Programs Manager for MARS) “As a result of the months of hard work by Oasis Foundation, the local ICI partner, and the coordination and training by PDA, ICI's national partner in Ghana, the iMPACT communities are coming together, understanding their development opportunities, creating their own vision and Community Action Plan and committing their own resources to achieve it. This is a great foundation for the other iMPACT partners to build on in specific areas such as cocoa farming, education, healthcare, water and sanitation, alternative non-cocoa livelihoods and environmental management. We saw in Nkranfoum how iMPACT farmer training (conducted by STCP) has lead to higher income and the community’s effort to use these resources to improve their school’s infrastructure and pay for a primary school teacher is impressive to see”.

This visit was a rare opportunity to raise awareness on cocoa sustainability challenges. For most of the senior managers involved this was their first time visiting a cocoa farm and directly interacting with rural farming families. This visit demonstrated the willingness of MARS   senior leaders to appreciate the complexity of the cocoa supply chain and the challenges in the sector. Impressed by the work being done in the field, one of them stated: “Everyone in our business needs to change their mindset from one where our products are made in our factories; to one where they understand that our products are made "from the farm to the foil"”.