Cocoa Sector in Cote d'Ivoire : Are Public-Private Partnerships Helpful?

The aim of this paper is to understand how an agricultural Public-Private Partnership (PPP) project namely vision for change (V4C) works by focusing on its productivity side. This paper shows that the program significantly increases the yield by 81.98 kilograms per hectare, the income by 37.9 percent and the price by 46.58 XOF (0.071 euros) per kg. One factor of success is the novel approach used to provide high yield and swollen-shoot tolerant technology. Second, the available technologies that meet the demand of the producers is mainly due to background investigations, training activities through innovation platforms, and external support provided by the extension agents (cocoa village centers operators). Third, the PPP platform has been a useful tool to coordinate the interventions as well as generating learning among stakeholders and thereby reducing the search and new discovery costs. The agreements among institutions of the platform lead to economies of scales and help to make new technologies affordable to the producers. In addition, policy coordination at macro level with public sector and a wide range of private companies with variety of interest help managing the tension between coordination and capture.