Cotton made in Africa now in Cameroon

Cotton made in Africa (CmiA), an initiative by the Aid by Trade Foundation (AbTF) that helps African

cotton farmers help themselves, now also includes Cameroon as seventh African nation after Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, according to yesterday’s press release by the initiative.

The extension means that after successful verification, more than 226,000 smallholder farmers from Cameroon will for the first time grow cotton according to the CmiA standard. Including their family members, this means more than 1.5 million people will now benefit from the initiative in Cameroon. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the program supports around 660,000 smallholder farmers and more than 4.8 million people in total.

Agriculture is an important source of income in Cameroon and rests almost entirely in the hands of smallholder farmers. So far, they have neither been able to fully tap into the potential of cotton growing nor improve their livelihood conditions significantly. Joining the CmiA system will change this, as the participating Cameroonian farmers will now benefit from the income from license fees, which are used to pay for CmiA cotton and are reinvested in the project regions.

In addition, training programs on modern, efficient and sustainable cultivation methods enable the cotton farmers to improve the quality of their cotton, yield higher crops and thus earn a better living.

Cotton made in Africa was launched in 2005 to help Sub-Saharan cotton growers help themselves and to promote sustainable cotton in the region. The initiative has international partners like C&A, H.I.S., the Otto Group and Puma that buy and process the cotton produced by around 435,000 smallholder farmers. According to the initiative, the “ecological footprint of CmiA cotton is much lower than that of conventionally cultivated cotton.”