Why this site?

As well as providing great skills and curriculum-related learning, it will help raise your students’ awareness and change their attitudes. You’ll be teaching them about how cocoa is farmed, and about the lives of the farmers, without whom there’d be no chocolate.

On average, each person in the UK spends an amazing £62 a year on chocolate.

School children eat chocolate nearly four times a week, often buying it with their own money. Comic Relief believes that if they spend thoughtfully they can make a real difference to the lives of cocoa farmers.

What do we aim to show?

If all the activities are carried out, students will learn that:

• their favourite chocolate bar may have started life in Ghana
• there are real people at every stage of the chain that brings chocolate to the shop
• at the start of this chain are the cocoa farmers whose daily lives are often hidden from us
• many of these cocoa farmers don’t earn enough for even the bare essentials
• students themselves can make a real difference through their shopping

To borrow from the Key Stage 2 framework for PSHE and Citizenship, we hope that by working on these activities your students will develop their sense of social justice and moral responsibility and begin to understand that their own choices and behaviours can affect local, national or global issues.

Why is Comic Relief involved?

Comic Relief has a serious commitment to tackling poverty and social injustice. Since 1985 we have raised nearly £400 million, with every penny donated by the public going to projects in the UK and in some of the poorest countries in the world. School students have played a vital role, with 65% of UK schools taking part in Red Nose Day. We also have over fifteen years of experience producing innovative educational materials to help explain the issues that lie behind what we do.

However, as well as making grants and raising awareness, Comic Relief is constantly looking for long-term solutions to the bigger problems that keep some of the world’s poorest people poor. Ideas that we hope will one day end the need for aid or charity altogether. We believe fairer trade is one of these.

Many poor farmers and workers in the developing world simply do not get a fair deal for all their hard work, especially when producing the things we use, wear or eat every day. We have supported projects across Africa that look at ways of dealing with this. In Ghana we have worked with Kuapa Kokoo, a co-operative of small-scale cocoa farmers, to help them get a better price for what they grow and become self-reliant. In October 2000, as part of the Comic Relief commitment to fairer trade, we worked with The Day Chocolate Company to launch our very own Fairtrade chocolate bar: Dubble. Since Dubble was launched over 7 million Dubble bars have been sold – supporting more than 45,000 Kuapa Kokoo cocoa growers in Ghana and promoting Fairtrade in the UK.

Through these teaching resources, we hope to show young people that they have a part in this too and that through their shopping, they have the power to help create a brighter, fairer future for everyone.

Where’s the print pack?

In 2000 we sent out a Pa Pa Paa! print pack to schools across the country. This edition is completely overhauled, updated and on the web. You can look at it online, or download it to print out. There’s also a companion DVD and a photo pack you can order here.