“As you can see, ADRA has entered the cashew business,” said Michael Kruger, president of ADRA International, to the Adventist Church’s Executive Committee during the 2024 Annual Council of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists (GC).
“For so many decades in the country of Ghana, ADRA trained an excess of 10K farmers not only to plant, but to work with cashews in their own country,” said Kruger. “International companies come in and purchase the cashews at the lowest price they could get. So what we saw was, for all our work with the farmers, it wasn’t changing their lives.”
This statement came after a video launching goodone, a new business venture by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), during their Constituency Report to the Annual Council Executive Committee.
As a social business fully owned by the ADRA, goodone will be able to provide sustainable change for cashew farmers and their communities through ADRA’s established structure and existing programs, as well as share support with partner ministries and organizations. ADRA will be able to reinvest the profits earned from the cashews back into the lives and communities of the farmers who grew them.
During his report, Kruger shared how ADRA began to look at their work, training, and operations with farming communities differently. “We can train people in a certain way but if we don’t insert ourselves in the value chain in a meaningful way—genuine change is hard to achieve,” he said.
Recently, ADRA began to ask themselves—in today’s world, how can we transform communities in a long term, sustainable way.
Now, through goodone, the farmers in Ghana are paid a premium by ADRA for their cashews. Instead of those cashews being grown in country and then shipped out to other countries for processing, roasting, and salting, because of ADRA, all that is being done in Ghana—bringing change directly to the farmers, their communities, and the country.
ADRA is thinking bigger than just cashews. Through the years, ADRA has worked and trained with thousands of farmers, through their various programs around the world. Challenging the Adventist Church’s Executive Committee, Kruger asked them to “think of the products and communities in need in your countries. What can this change, what can this opportunity, bring about?”
After the report was given, each delegate was given a card with a QR code to lead them to the goodone website, along with a snack-sized packet of the new cashews.
In the next month, vending machines will be delivered to the General Conference building for employees to purchase cashews. For those not in the GC, cashews will be for sale and through subscription to the public starting in late 2024 on goodone’s website.
In parting, Geoffery Mbwana, general vice-president for the GC and ADRA Board member said, “As a member of the ADRA board, I wish to confirm, goodone is good. I may not be from Ghana, but I am from the continent of Africa, and I resonate very well with this move. If goodone is good. ADRA is good.”
To learn more about goodone, hear stories from the farmers helped, and to order and subscribe to your own cashews, visit the goodone website.
This article was published on the ADRA International website.
