Quick Take

Good Intentions, No Easy Solution: Why Income Diversification Needs a Gender Reckoning

May 12, 2026

When cocoa prices collapsed in Côte D’Ivoire during the 2025–2026 season, the government cut the guaranteed farmgate prices by nearly 60 percent. For millions of smallholder families, it was a crisis. For some women in cocoa communities, their vegetable gardens became a lifeline—exactly the kind of income buffer that development experts have long recommended. Diversification, it seemed, worked. But our field research tells a more complicated story.

Those same women described diversification as simultaneously a blessing and a burden – and understanding why matters enormously for companies and NGOs working on livelihoods and child labor in agricultural supply chains.

At both the Geneva Center for Business and Human Rights and the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, our work often starts where NGO work ends. We not only diagnose and document human rights abuses; we develop and test solutions in practice. That distinction matters, because solutions that look sound in theory can have unintended consequences on the ground. Only field research reveals whether they actually work, and for whom.

Our research in Côte d’Ivoire provides a striking example.

The Appeal of Diversification

Livelihood vulnerability is one of the most entrenched systemic challenges facing farming communities in global food supply chains. When a single commodity dominates household income, as cocoa does for millions of families in West Africa, price volatility creates profound instability. The standard recommended response is income diversification: encourage farmers to cultivate additional cash crops, maintain vegetable gardens for subsistence, and reduce their dependence on any single market.

In principle, this is sound advice. Diversification can provide a critical buffer when commodity prices collapse, as they did dramatically in Côte d’Ivoire during the 2024–2025 season, when the government was forced to cut the guaranteed farmgate price for cocoa by nearly 60 percent following a sharp fall in global prices. During field research in cocoa communities, we spoke with women who described exactly this dynamic: their vegetable gardens had become a lifeline, feeding their families through a period of acute financial pressure.

But from the perspective of women in these communities, diversification is a mixed blessing.

The Hidden Work of Women

In most rural farming communities in West Africa, additional income-generating activities do not distribute themselves equally across households. They fall disproportionately on women, who already carry the primary responsibility for fetching water and firewood, preparing meals, caring for children, and managing the domestic economy of the household. When diversification strategies add new tasks, it is women whose working days lengthen.

The consequences extend to the next generation. When mothers are overburdened, daughters are frequently pulled out of school to help with additional farming activities, to care for younger siblings, or simply to absorb part of the domestic workload. In Côte d’Ivoire, we observed girls carrying heavy loads of firewood, an activity that qualifies as one of the worst forms of child labor under international standards. The connection between women’s work burdens and girls’ school attendance is direct and consistently overlooked in standard diversification recommendations.

What Responsible Diversification Requires

This does not mean diversification is the wrong strategy. It means it needs to be implemented with far greater care and gender awareness than is typically the case.

First, basic infrastructure matters enormously. Functioning wells that bring clean water closer to homes can reduce the hours women spend on water collection each day, time that can be redirected toward more productive or restorative activities. Infrastructure investments of this kind are not peripheral to human rights due diligence in agricultural supply chains; they are foundational.

Second, the design of diversification activities matters. Some options, such as small-scale chicken farming, can generate supplementary income without dramatically increasing working hours. Other cash crops, if poorly sequenced, add significant burdens with delayed returns.

Third, agronomic guidance is essential and frequently absent. Introducing alternative cash crops alongside cocoa requires careful planning to avoid damaging existing trees and soil productivity. Agroforestry approaches, for instance, planting rubber trees that produce after seven years and whose canopy can then provide shade for coffee cultivation, can build diversified income streams over time without sacrificing the main crop. But this kind of phased, technically informed transition requires on-the-ground support from agronomists that most farming communities simply do not have access to.

No Simple Solutions

This example illustrates a broader principle that runs through our research: there are no simple solutions to systemic human rights challenges. Even approaches that are correct in principle can cause harm if introduced without adequate attention to local context, gender dynamics, and implementation sequencing. Companies and NGOs working on child labor and farmer livelihoods in cocoa supply chains would be ill-advised to recommend income diversification without these considerations or the sustained support needed to make them work in practice.

Getting solutions right requires going beyond diagnosis. It requires sustained presence in the communities affected, harder questions about who bears the costs of recommended interventions, a willingness to develop tailored solutions in genuine collaboration with local communities and authorities, and accountability for the outcomes.

Global Labor