February 9, 2026
For more than 130 years, Hershey has been deeply invested in the well-being of the communities that help us create our iconic snacks. Our founder, Milton Hershey, created the Milton Hershey School with the promise of providing a quality education and a path to a productive and fulfilling future for children. And this promise continues to guide us even today.
As part of our commitment to supporting cocoa farmers and their families, Hershey has helped advance several initiatives and partnerships in Côte d'Ivoire. Through a multifaceted approach, our work in Côte d'Ivoire allows us to address the root causes of child labor and poverty in the cocoa supply chain, particularly through access to education and resources for children.
Hershey's commitment to strengthening education in Côte d'Ivoire begins with building the foundational infrastructure that children need to learn safely. Hershey's collaboration in Côte d'Ivoire with CNS (Côte d'Ivoire's National Oversight Committee for the Fight Against Child Labor, Trafficking, and Exploitation) and the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) began in 2023, with Hershey providing financing and strategic partnership, ICI leading implementation, and CNS, chaired by the country's First Lady Dominique Ouattara, offering valuable guidance and technical oversight. As part of this program, Hershey committed to funding the construction of 10 public primary schools by 2025. Today, all 10 schools have been constructed ahead of schedule, and Hershey has funded the construction of seven additional schools. Together, these 17 new schools are benefiting more than 5,400 elementary school children. School construction remains an integral part of our education efforts in Côte d'Ivoire, representing the core investment upon which all of our other initiatives, including digital learning tools, are built. That's why Hershey is aiming to extend our partnership and fund the construction of eight more primary schools by the end of 2026.
This investment in safe, dedicated learning spaces forms the backbone of our mission to support children in cocoa-growing communities. It also reinforces a central learning from our work: meaningful progress is built through layered interventions and partnerships — infrastructure, pedagogy, and technology — leading to steady and ongoing educational gains over time, setting children up for future success. We're committed to applying these insights as we continue investing in the well-being of cocoa-farming families in Côte d'Ivoire and beyond.
Building on this foundation, we explored how technology could further support student learning through a year-long initiative to distribute tablets to students in three schools. Our Classroom Electrification, Technological, and Pedagogical Support Project, implemented in partnership with the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), involved the distribution of 216 educational tablets to students in three Hershey-supported schools between October 2024 and May 2025.
To fully understand the results of the program, it's essential to recognize the conditions that made this progress possible. The success of the tablet initiative was shaped by several key factors, including newly constructed schools with trained teachers, reliable electricity and charging stations, structured pedagogical materials tailored to the Ivorian curriculum, and strong partnerships with the Ministry of National Education and Literacy. These elements created an enabling environment that allowed tablets to reinforce learning rather than replace traditional teaching. Taken together, these conditions show that the progress achieved was not dependent on the tablets alone, but on coordinated, layered investments that would also be essential if replicated elsewhere.
In the one year since we began this initiative, we've seen remarkable results. The percentage of students passing end-of-cycle exams in these three schools rose from 35% in 2023–2024 to 94% in 2024–2025, an incredible 59 percentage-point increase—far surpassing the national average of 86%. However, there are cultural and infrastructural challenges to adoption and implementation, such as limited parental involvement, lack of household literacy, damage to equipment, and connectivity issues. To address these challenges, the project introduced targeted mitigation measures: teachers received enhanced and ongoing training, remedial literacy sessions were established to support students with early reading difficulties, and practical infrastructure solutions, like providing power strips at schools, were deployed to facilitate continuity of use. Together, these adaptations strengthened adoption, reduced operational friction, and ensured the technology could be effectively integrated into daily learning despite structural constraints.
Education remains a cornerstone of Hershey's vision for the future. While the improvement in student performance in Côte d'Ivoire this year demonstrates what is possible when companies, governments, NGOs, teachers, and parents work together to support the next generation, there is a continued need for industry leadership and partnership to solve this complex problem. In addition to school construction, we are providing cash incentives through the Hershey Income Accelerator Program to farming families that encourage children's school attendance. Along with more than a dozen other cocoa sector companies, the Jacobs Foundation and the government of Côte d'Ivoire, we are also investing in the Child Learning and Education Facility (CLEF) that focuses on teaching training, remedial learning and quality education, all with an eye toward improving children's education. In Ghana, we are one of several companies that have partnered with the Jacobs Foundation, World Bank, and the government of Ghana to support a new education-focused initiative called System Change Approach for Learning Excellence (SCALE). Our current work reaffirms our long-standing commitment to cocoa-producing communities; the challenges reinforce the progress that still needs to be made to achieve a truly resilient cocoa supply chain.