Ivory Coast

The chocolate industry's relationship with Ivorian men is a story of global exploitation written in cocoa. The men and boys who produce the world's chocolate — often using machetes in tropical heat for less than $2 per day — have typically never tasted the product their labor creates. An estimated 1.5 million children, predominantly boys, work on Ivorian cocoa farms despite international pledges to eliminate child labor. These boys become men whose only skill is farming a crop they don't control the price of, in a system designed to extract maximum value while returning minimum compensation.

The post-civil-war reconciliation has been superficial. Northern men (predominantly Dioula, Muslim) and southern men (predominantly Bété, Baoulé, Christian) fought each other for nearly a decade, and while the shooting has stopped, the communities live alongside each other with unprocessed trauma and unresolved grievances. In Abidjan — one of West Africa's most dynamic cities — young men navigate the "brouteur" (internet scammer) economy, where romance scams targeting Western victims have become a viable masculine career path. The moral complexity is significant: men who can't find legitimate employment use deception to provide for their families, performing a masculine role through fraud because the legitimate economy offers no alternative.