From Bean to Bar and Beyond - Traceability and Women's Financial Visibility

Tony’s Open Chain (TOC) is a collaborative cocoa sourcing initiative used by cocoa companies and chocolate producers, including Tony’s Chocolonely, to create traceable, fairer supply chains. It requires that 100% of its cocoa is traceable, from cooperatives to processors, and applies shared standards designed to address farmer poverty, deforestation, child labor, and exploitation. Its key components — which include farmer registration, geolocation, and delivery records for traceability — not only fulfil a supply chain requirement, but also serve a second, less obvious purpose: they make smallholder farmers visible to financial service providers, often for the first time.  

ABERA’s in-field experience with the COOPAZA cooperative in Abengourou and CAYAT cooperative in Adzopé examined the opportunity this presents for women smallholder farmers (who have historically been the most excluded from formal finance) and what is needed to unlock it.  

Why financial visibility matters 

In Côte d’Ivoire, women perform an estimated 68% of cocoa labor but earn just 21% of the income generated. In male-headed households, which are currently the norm in TOC’s supply chain, cash payments often flow through the male — who usually owns the land — leaving no individual financial record for the women who have done much of the work.  

In such markets, a traceable digital payment from the cooperative to a woman’s own account doesn’t just improve equity — it creates the financial identity that lenders require. Women in such cooperatives rely almost entirely on Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) for credit and loans, which are capped, creating an abundance of demand for a small, oversubscribed pool of capital. A formal lender could do more, but only if it can see who it is lending to, and if the lending products offered are designed with and for women.

The stakes are also raised by climate risk. For cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, the same traceability data — geolocation, delivery history, farm-level records — that supply chain actors use for compliance and impact programming are also what insurers need to price individual farm risk rather than relying on imprecise area-based estimates. This precise data is also what may permit farmers to build a credit profile and increase their access to credit via traditional banking or microfinance institutions.

The benefits add up: when payments are digitized into individually named accounts, that identity becomes legible to lenders. When it is combined with VSLA repayment records and farm productivity data, it begins to look like a credit file. And when insurers and other financial service providers (FSPs) can price individual farm risk rather than approximating it, climate-resilient financial products may become viable at scale.

ABERA’s work with local cooperatives reveals three key considerations that are important to unlock this opportunity. 

 1. There must be a viable business case

Visibility is an important first step, but alone it is not enough. Financial institutions must also see a viable business case and develop products suited to seasonal agricultural cash flows. Here, digital traceability can satisfy an important precondition: reliable information about who farmers are, how they earn income, and how they participate in agricultural value chains. Over several harvest cycles, this can show a pattern of consistent delivery and output; the kind of track record a lender would otherwise only be able to get from years of banking history. This data pattern is what can then turn visibility into a business case: providing enough repeated, verifiable data to price the risk of lending to a woman farmer. 

“When a cooperative’s cocoa is visible to a buyer, it also makes its farmers visible to a bank.” 

2. Digital payments are the next layer

At present, financial traceability stops at the farm gate. The beans are traceable, but the payments are not. Despite the potential, many cooperatives still pay farmers for the beans in cash, meaning that there is no verifiable trace of a farmer’s cash flow.  

To address this, TOC is offering training to strengthen cooperatives' digital and financial literacy, including how to use digitized payments. They are currently partnering with Agriterra, a nonprofit dedicated to strengthening farmer cooperatives and agricultural organizations, which is delivering mobile banking training to 14,000 members across six cooperatives.  

Increasing digital payments will create time-stamped digital payment records that formal financial services can be built on. These systems could be used to connect farm-level data to financial services access. 

3. Access must not outpace capability

As the technology advances, there is a critical caveat. In focus group discussions at the CAYAT and COOPAZA cooperatives, women described serious experiences of mobile money fraud. One woman lost 700,000 FCFA (around 1,200 USD) during a hospital stay. Another lost her entire balance to a phishing message she could not read. These are not isolated incidents: fraud and scam experiences were a recurring theme across both cooperatives, and fear of similar losses shapes how women engage with digital tools more broadly.  

In the cooperatives ABERA spoke to, many women could not read or write, making navigating digital interfaces dangerous as well as difficult. Several women had abandoned mobile money entirely and returned to keeping cash at home.

The same infrastructure that creates the opportunity for financial inclusion can, without adequate support, create new vectors for exploitation. Farmers’ capabilities must therefore grow in proportion to the services offered to them. This means sequenced programming – i.e.,  building protective literacy first (fraud recognition and account security), then transactional literacy (actively sending money, saving, and using digital tools for VSLA operations), and finally productive literacy (accessing credit, insurance, and agricultural information).  TOC’s partnership with Agriterra is key to the design of that programming — peer-delivered, low-literacy adapted, and sequenced carefully. These elements will determine whether it protects women or inadvertently exposes them.

Beyond crop traceability infrastructure, there are a number of additional use cases emerging that show how other forms of data verification can be used to increase access to finance. Dvara E-Registry (DER), an agri-fintech in rural India and ABERA cohort member, is one such example. Since women disproportionately lack formal land titles, DER has been using satellite imagery and AI to generate a “KhetScore” — a digital farm profile assessing creditworthiness based on farm cash flow rather than land ownership. This data-based approach has opened formal credit to farmers who were previously excluded. Among new-to-credit DER customers, 32% of primary borrowers are now women. DER also bundles credit with insurance, using picture-based verification to reduce costs and make bite-sized coverage commercially viable.

A virtuous circle

What we have seen in Côte d’Ivoire indicates that traceability built for compliance and impact programming can, layer-by-layer, become the foundation for financial inclusion — through visibility for lenders, a credit history, and insurable risk — as long as capability-building keeps pace with access.  

However, realizing this potential is not automatic. It will require TOC and partners like Agriterra to sequence literacy alongside infrastructure, financial institutions to design products around women's actual cash flows and risk profiles, and donors to treat traceability data as a public good worth investing in beyond any single supply chain. If they get this right, the potential for women smallholder farmers is huge.