"Sharing lessons learned and developing ways forward"

London, 1-2 April 2008

This Conference, sponsored by the International Cocoa Initiative, has provided an opportunity for practioners, experts, policy makers, campaigners and representatives of the private sector to exchange experiences and views on what is known about child labour in agriculture, what progress has been made, what lessons have been learned and what this tells us about the ways forward. 

Participants were invited to contribute to an informed international debate with the aim of sharing lessons learned and developing ways forward. It is an excellent forum to present and demonstrate findings, methods, and approaches that have proven successful. It will be an opportunity for the international stakeholders to exchange ideas on the progress of developing a new model including demonstrations, forums and opinion/future vision papers.

The Conference brought together government officials, the international development community, non-governmental organizations, lecturers, researchers and members of the private sector to examine the issues surrounding child and forced labour in the cocoa and similar sectors. The objective was to share experiences on how to build awareness and create local capacity to support community level change, work with national governments and international agencies to ensure a positive policy and development environment and work with industry to help them better understand the issues and challenges and change their business practices. 

You can consult the Conference Agenda  and the Conference outline. The final list of participants is available by clicking here. All conference enquiries should be sent to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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The full conference report will soon be posted on this page. However you can already read the Conference recommendations.