For decades, the most important information in cocoa supply chains – such as who grew the beans, where the farm is located, whether child labour protocols were followed, and whether the land was farmed sustainably – has existed only on paper, in people’s memories, and in sprawling Excel files on laptops that sometimes crash. SafeCrop Insight is changing the game.
SafeCrop Insight is the proprietary digital platform built by SafeCrop to bring structure, accountability, and traceability to the cocoa supply chains we serve in West Africa. It is designed for the realities of cocoa farming in Ghana and the demands of an increasingly compliance-driven global market. And it is already changing how field officers work, how cooperatives report, and how buyers verify.
The Problem We Were Solving
Anyone who has worked in a cocoa cooperative knows what farm-level data management looked like before digital platforms arrived: paper forms completed in the field, often in poor light or rain. Data re-entered manually by someone back at the office – assuming the forms survived the journey. Excel spreadsheets that multiplied across hard drives, none of them quite matching. Audit season is arriving like a storm, with staff scrambling to reconstruct records that should have been captured months earlier.
This was not incompetence. It was the consequence of an industry that for years prioritised yield over documentation, because buyers did not ask, and regulators did not require it. But the landscape has changed dramatically. The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) now requires that cocoa entering Europe be fully traceable to the farm of origin, with evidence that production did not drive deforestation. Rainforest Alliance, UTZ, Fairtrade, and organic certification standards have grown more rigorous. Child labour due diligence is no longer optional.
Cooperatives that cannot demonstrate compliance through verified, timestamped, field-collected data will lose access to premium markets. It is that straightforward.
SafeCrop Insight was built to ensure that our cooperatives and the farmers they represent would never face that fate.
What Is SafeCrop Insight?
SafeCrop Insight is a comprehensive digital data management and traceability platform. Designed for use on mobile devices by field officers, it enables data to be collected directly at the farm, community, school, or household level, even in areas with no internet connectivity. Records are synchronised automatically when a connection becomes available.
Our platform is currently organised into five focused modules, each addressing a specific aspect of responsible cocoa supply chain management. Together, they provide a comprehensive digital overview of every farmer, farm, training session, community and environmental intervention within our network.
Module One: Sustainability and Certification Surveys
This is the operational heart of SafeCrop Insight, the module that drives our certification and compliance work.
It contains five tools:
Farmer Profiling creates a permanent digital record for every producer in our network. This profile captures the farmer’s personal and demographic information, details about their farm, household context, and certification status. For a farmer who has previously existed only on a paper form locked in a filing cabinet, this is transformative. Their profile becomes a living document, updated with each inspection, training, or input event, always accessible to the cooperative and, where appropriate, to auditors and buyers.
Inspection Surveys enable field officers to conduct structured farm-level assessments in the field. These assessments evaluate farming practices, compliance with certification standards, and on-farm conditions. The data is entered directly into the system, so there is no need for transcription, no delays and no lost forms. Each inspection is timestamped and linked to the relevant farmer’s profile, creating a documented history of their compliance journey.
Training and Sensitisation Tracker solve one of the most overlooked documentation challenges in certification: proving that training actually happened. Certification bodies require evidence that farmers have been trained in good agricultural practices, child protection, environmental standards, and more. This tool logs every training event, including who attended, when and where it took place, and what was covered. These records can withstand auditor scrutiny.
Producer Entry allows for flexible, ongoing data entry linked to specific producers – recording updates, changes, and activities that fall outside the scope of formal inspections but are still important to track.
Subcontractor Monitoring extends the compliance net beyond the first-tier farmers to the contractors and service providers operating within our supply chains. This matters because certification standards increasingly require accountability not just from farmers, but from the broader network of actors who interact with them.
Module Two: Community Development Surveys (CLMRS)
The second module reflects something that sets SafeCrop apart: our belief that sustainable cocoa is not just about what happens on a farm, but about what happens in the communities where farming families live.
The CLMRS (Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System) module is specifically designed to support social compliance work at the community level. It contains eight survey types:
- Community Survey – capturing the broader social context of a farming community
- School Survey – assessing school attendance, infrastructure, and proximity for children in farming households
- Household Survey – documenting the composition, welfare, and economic situation of individual families
- Observation Survey – recording direct observations at the household or community level
- Child Survey – structured assessments focused specifically on the welfare and education status of children
- Community Risk Assessment – identifying community-level factors that create vulnerability to child labour
- Vulnerable Group Assessment – identifying and tracking households, children, and community members who are at heightened risk and require targeted intervention or support
- Child and Forced Labour Assessment – direct assessments of labour practices within households and communities
- Gender Risk Assessment – evaluating the risks and conditions facing women in farming communities
This module has been developed to provide evidence to international buyers, particularly those operating under the Rainforest Alliance and CLMRS frameworks, that cooperatives are actively monitoring and addressing child labour risks, rather than merely promising to do so. SafeCrop Insight provides this evidence in a systematic and verifiable way.
The depth of this module extends beyond the farm. SafeCrop Insight extends all the way into the household, the school, and the community, because that is where the most complex risks actually live.
Module Three: Environmental Projects
The third module addresses the growing demand for environmental accountability in cocoa supply chains.
Its current centrepiece is the Agroforestry Survey, a tool that allows field officers to document agroforestry systems, tree planting, and environmental restoration work being undertaken within our project areas. As buyers and certification bodies look for evidence that cocoa farmers are not just avoiding deforestation but actively contributing to reforestation and biodiversity, this documentation becomes critical.
With EUDR requiring farm-level traceability that includes environmental verification, having structured, field-collected agroforestry data is a competitive advantage, and increasingly, a baseline requirement.
Module Four: Organic Projects
For cooperatives pursuing organic certification, the fourth module provides dedicated tools for capturing and reporting on organic farming practices. Organic audits require rigorous documentation of inputs, practices, and buffer zones. This module ensures that the data needed to satisfy those requirements is collected consistently, linked to specific producers, and available when auditors come calling.
Module Five: Attendance Log
Simple, but essential. The Attendance Log module tracks field officer visits, farmer meetings, training sessions, and community engagements, creating a timestamped record of all field activities. This matters for two reasons: it allows cooperative managers to monitor field team performance, and it provides auditors with evidence of active programme implementation, not just paper commitments.
How It Works in the Field
Picture a field officer setting out for the day with a mobile device loaded with SafeCrop Insight. She drives to a remote farming community, well beyond the reach of mobile data. She opens the app and begins an inspection survey for a farmer she is visiting. She works through the structured questionnaire, capturing data about farming practices, input use, and compliance indicators. She photographs relevant evidence. Before she leaves, she also conducts a household survey with the farmer’s family, flagging a child whose school attendance has been irregular. She logs the visit in the Attendance module.
At no point does she need an internet connection. Everything she captures is stored locally on the device.
Later that evening, back in town, the device syncs. Every data point she collected flows into the SafeCrop Insight backend — linked to the correct farmer profiles, timestamped, and instantly available to cooperative managers monitoring from their dashboard.
This is what field data collection looks like when it is designed to work in the real conditions of West African cocoa farming, not the ideal conditions of a product demo.
Why It Matters for Buyers and Auditors
The beneficiaries of SafeCrop Insight are not just farmers and field officers. For buyers and auditors, the platform delivers something that has historically been extremely difficult to obtain from West African supply chains: structured, verifiable, field-collected data that links every batch of cocoa to specific farms, farmers, and practices.
When a buyer asks whether our supply chain is EUDR-compliant, we can answer with evidence, not promises. When a Rainforest Alliance auditor wants to see CLMRS records, we can produce them within hours rather than weeks. When an organic certifier needs documentation of farming practices, the records are there, linked to the farmer’s profile, timestamped from the field.
This is what trust in a supply chain actually looks like. Not assurances. Evidence.
The Competitive Reality
The post-EUDR environment has fundamentally changed the economics of cocoa supply chain management. Cooperatives that cannot produce farm-level traceability data, and documentation of their social and environmental practices are facing restricted market access, lower prices, or outright exclusion from European markets.
This is not a temporary disruption. It is a permanent shift in what buyers require. And it is a shift that will separate the cooperatives and sourcing companies that invested in digital systems from those that did not.
SafeCrop Insight is our answer to that shift. It was not built to tick boxes for auditors. It was built because we believe that transparent, documented, verifiable supply chains are better for everyone; farmers, cooperatives, buyers, and the communities where cocoa is grown.
What’s Next
SafeCrop Insight is a living platform. We are continuously developing new capabilities based on the evolving needs of our supply chains and our partners, including predictive yield modelling, financial inclusion integrations to connect farmers with mobile money and credit tools, and climate data layering to integrate rainfall and soil health indicators alongside farm-level records.
The foundation we have built — structured farmer profiles, community welfare data, environmental documentation, and certification records — positions us to layer in these capabilities as the technology and the market demand for them matures.
A Platform Built for This Work
There is no shortage of digital agriculture platforms in the world. Most of them were designed for agricultural systems that look nothing like smallholder cocoa farming in Ghana. They assume reliable internet. They assume literate users who are comfortable with technology. They assume supply chains where the hard work of farmer engagement has already been done.
The people who built SafeCrop Insight understand what fieldwork actually looks like here. They know about the connectivity gaps, community relationships, and the specific demands of certification bodies operating in West African cocoa. They are familiar with the complexity of CLMRS and gender risk frameworks. This knowledge is embedded in every module, survey, and workflow.
It is, genuinely, a platform built for this work.
If your cooperative, sourcing company, or certification programme needs traceability infrastructure that works in the real conditions of West African cocoa, we would welcome the conversation.
SafeCrop is a data-driven agribusiness and supply chain management company operating in Ghana’s cocoa sector. SafeCrop Insight is our proprietary digital platform for farm-level traceability, certification management, and community development monitoring.
