Tackling child labour

15 May 2012 – The International Cocoa Initiative is working to eliminate child labour from the cocoa supply chain. The holistic community empowerment model promoted by ICI is recognised by ILO/IPEC as an important contribution to bringing about the sustainable changes necessary to protect children, and forms the basis of an exciting new collaboration between the two organisations in West Africa.

Funded by the US Department of Labour (with complementary industry funding for parallel activities under a Public-Private Partnership project) the ILO Cocoa Communities Project will target 5,000 children in child labour or at high risk of falling into child labour, in 80 cocoa-growing communities in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. ICI will facilitate community owned and community led change processes, supporting farmers to better understand the complex child labour issue, and to develop Community Action Plans. These will lead to concrete investments and initiatives, within the communities, that keep children in school and out of harmful work, and which will enable close monitoring of the risks and practices.

The project promotes an ‘integrated area-based approach’ that seeks also to tackle the various socio-economic root-causes of child labour within all occupational sectors in which cocoa-growing communities are engaged. This is in line with the principles of “Emerging good practice in combating the worst forms of child labour in West African cocoa growing communities”, developed jointly in 2011 by ICI and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These state that all efforts to tackle child labour should be:

• Bottom up, community-based, and contextualised;

• Holistic, tackling multiple drivers simultaneously;

• Cross-sectoral (beyond cocoa);

• Child-oriented, in the best interest of the child;

• Nationally led but partnership based;

• Coordinated for efficiency and coherence.

This advances the vision that emerged from an international conference of experts organized by ICI in 2008, stating that the cocoa sector must be built on thriving cocoa communities, where all children have access to quality education and training, where farmers make sufficient revenue that allows them to invest in their farm, their family and their community, and where the cocoa supply chain is more efficient and transparent, providing consumers with greater confidence in the chocolate that they consume.

This new partnership between ILO and ICI builds on ICI’s 8 years of field experience working in West African cocoa communities, reaching a total population of 689,000. During this time, significant progress has been made in understanding how best to combat the worst forms of child labour on West African cocoa farms.

ICI is proud contributing to the increased collaboration between actors in the cocoa sector with this ILO/CCP/PPP project. Meaningful partnership of all actors is crucial to translating the vision of thriving cocoa communities into effective action.

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