Research into Bougainville and Cocoa (Meeting with VSA)

Pre meeting:
VSA - Volunteer Service Abroad
10 year conflict
After the conflict the region had virtually no economic activity, and education and health services were badly damaged.
VSA works to strengthen economic development through; vocational education and skills training such as book keeping; Livelihood opportunities such as small business management and marketing; transport infrastructure such as road maintenance.
ARoB is made up of Buka island, Bougainville island, and 166 smaller islands. Arawa and Buka being the main cities.

Their main issues include:
Climate change migration - Carteret island is becoming inhabitable due to climate change so their residents are needing to relocate to mainland bougainville and need to be set up with land to grow cocoa.
Agriculture cocoa - Cocoa is their most financial crop, 2/3s of families in bougainville fram cocoa. How can we ensure the benefits of growing cocoa on a national/international scale are going to the families that need it most. How can we add value to a basic product of cocoa beans to generate a higher income? 

Meeting:
From meeting with Kesaya from VSA we learnt more about the culture and the real problems.

• Health is a main issue
• Along with transport
• They have a water shortage (however have high humidity if we could work with that)
• Not very much tourism, hard to get to the island and expensive
• Look into documentaries and contact volunteers and look into their blogs 
• We want to utilise whats there, using local resources rather than adding to the problem. 
• Look into tippytap Unicef
• Make sure it's easy to maintain
• PNG have major dietary problems in towns
• Currently using diesel to generate power
• Kids mechinism for power, make sure it's interesting so kids wont get board, think about child labour
• They have access to small markets and large scale shipments. 
• Bougainville Chocolate Festival
• They produce cocoa beans, coffee, sugar cane, peanuts/peanutbutter
• They sometimes use cocoa beans for firewood
• If making chocolate in Bougainville think about health and safety standards shipping it to NZ etc 
• Maybe talk to James Bushel chair of the Wellington Chocolate Factory