Beyond certification: Fairtrade Africa’s DONUTS agenda

There is a moment in almost every development conversation where someone says the quiet part out loud: certification alone is not enough.

It sounds almost like heresy in a system built on standards, audits, and stamps of approval. But it is exactly from that tension that Fairtrade Africa’s Dignified Opportunities Nurtured through Trade & Sustainability (DONUTS) programme takes shape.

This is not a rebranding exercise. It is an attempt to deal with what certification cannot reach.

At Fairtrade Africa, DONUTS is led globally by project manager Thomas Mukhebi, with country-level implementation in Ghana managed by Benjamin Asare. Between them sits a programme that is less about theory and more about what happens when policy meets muddy fields, unstable incomes, and communities trying to hold everything together at once.

Mukhebi is clear about the gap the programme is trying to close. Certification has done important work, he says, but it cannot carry everything.

“Certification is important and has made a significant impact,” he explains, “but there are issues that cannot be resolved by certification alone.”

Those issues are not abstract. They are social dynamics in farming communities. They are income levels that still do not add up. They are environmental pressures that do not respect audit cycles. They are workers who may technically be “compliant” on paper, but still excluded from real decision-making.

DONUTS was built to sit in that uncomfortable space.

Ghana: where the gaps become visible

In Ghana, the programme comes into sharp focus in the cocoa sector, where Benjamin Asare spends much of his time working directly with farmers.

He does not romanticise certification.

“It is good,” he says, “but not enough to support all the needs of cocoa farmers in Ghana.”

The list of what sits outside certification is long. Productivity at farm level. Land degradation. Illegal mining pressures that eat away at farmland. Limited access to finance.

DONUTS steps into the spaces where systems on their own fall short.

One of the most practical examples is something called dynamic agroforestry. It sounds technical, but in practice it is quite simple. Farmers are trained to integrate trees back into cocoa systems, restore degraded land, and reduce dependence on chemical inputs.

It is slow work. It does not deliver headlines. But it changes the long-term viability of farms.

Alongside this is a quieter but equally important intervention: Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs), which give farmers access to basic financial systems that most would otherwise be excluded from.

“These are things certification does not fully address,” Asare says. “But DONUTS brings them directly to the farmers.”

The harder problems are not technical

If there is a thread running through DONUTS, it is that the hardest problems in agriculture are rarely technical. They are social.

Child labour is one of them.

In Ghana, Asare describes cases where children were effectively excluded from schooling, including children with disabilities whose families had withdrawn them from public life altogether. Through the programme’s interventions, some of these children have now been reintegrated into school systems.

It is not framed as a success story in the usual sense. It is framed as something that should never have been necessary in the first place, but still required intervention to correct.

That is the reality DONUTS operates in. Not ideal systems. Real ones.

When ‘participation’ actually means power

For Mukhebi, one of the central questions in the programme is deceptively simple: do farmers and workers actually have a voice, or are they just present in the room?

He breaks the problem down into two gaps. First, whether people understand their rights. Second, whether they can actually access the spaces where decisions are made.

“You cannot participate in something you cannot access,” he says in effect.

DONUTS tries to address both. Training builds awareness of rights and responsibilities. At the same time, the programme helps create or strengthen platforms where those rights can be discussed in practice.

In Southern Africa, that has meant structured dialogue between farm owners, workers, and government. In Ethiopia, similar conversations are happening in the flower sector, where workers and management are brought into the same space with public authorities.

It is not glamorous work. It is meetings, negotiations, and uncomfortable conversations. But that is often where power shifts actually happen.

Policy change that starts in the field

One of the more interesting parts of the Ghana experience is how local practice has begun to influence policy thinking.

Through the Sankofa project, farmers were already adopting environmental practices that align closely with emerging European regulations on due diligence in supply chains.

Long before those regulations became global talking points, farmers in the programme were already being trained to reduce deforestation pressure, avoid burning practices, and rethink how cocoa farms are established on degraded land instead of clearing new forests.

Asare is careful here. This is not about ticking compliance boxes after the fact. It is about being ahead of the curve because the work made sense on the ground before it made sense in policy documents.

Even farm mapping, often treated as a bureaucratic requirement, has been done properly at field level, with GPS coordinates attached to farms.

“It is already there,” Asare says. “We are not starting from scratch.”

When farmworkers find their voice, work finds its dignity

Trade is the next frontier

If the first phase of DONUTS has been about fixing gaps inside the system, the next phase is about widening the system itself.

One of the most ambitious ideas is South-to-South trade, which sounds academic until you strip it down.

Right now, most Fairtrade markets sit in Europe and North America. African producers grow the products, but do not always consume them.

Mukhebi’s argument is simple. That needs to change.

If African consumers buy Fairtrade products within African markets, then the system stops being externally dependent. It becomes embedded locally. It also means farmers are not only producing for distant buyers, but for communities closer to home.

Asare sees the same opportunity, but also the practical upside. Some Fairtrade products made in Ghana are not widely available locally. Expanding internal markets would change that and potentially strengthen producer organisations financially.

There is also something more subtle at play. When communities can consume what they produce under fair conditions, the idea of “fair trade” stops being abstract. It becomes visible.

What success actually looks like

Ask Mukhebi what success would look like at the end of this phase, and he does not talk about scale or numbers first. He talks about rights.

Success, he says, is farmers and workers understanding their rights, knowing who is responsible for protecting them, and having the ability to sit in the spaces where decisions are made.

It is not about perfection. It is about participation that is real enough to matter.

That includes stronger worker committees, gender structures, and local platforms where decisions are not simply communicated downward, but shaped collectively.

In the end, DONUTS is not trying to polish the edges of certification. It is trying to build what sits around it: the relationships, the trust, and the systems that make dignity possible in practice, not just in principle.

And that is why it matters.