Every year ICI and its members report on their efforts to tackle child labour in the cocoa sector. This allows us to track progress over time, highlight areas for improvement and drive transparency in the sector. The results from the October 2023 – September 2024 period show increased coverage of systems to prevent and address child labour, that now reach over 1.17 million households in West Africa.
“We are really pleased to see continued scale up of Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems, which are now reaching an estimated 55% of the cocoa-growing households in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, with these systems providing more support than ever before,” said ICI Executive Director Matthias Lange.
The 2024 report covers activities from October 2023 to September 2024 in Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroun, and Nigeria – a period that was especially challenging for the sector. Many farmers in West Africa experienced decreasing yields, due to crop disease, weather and climate change. While the price of cocoa on international markets hit record highs, farmers in West Africa have only partially benefitted from these, and many have had less cocoa to sell. Added to this were other challenges, for example continued high inflation in Ghana that drove up the cost of living.
“Families in cocoa-growing communities continue to face challenges and need ongoing support so that these don’t lead to child labour,” Lange explained.
Expanding reach of measures to tackle child labour in cocoa
By September 2024, ICI members’ Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) covered about 1.17 million households – a rise of 11% from 2023 and 65% since 2022 (the first year of the reporting exercise). CLMRS are child-centred support systems. They identify children in, or at risk of, child labour, provide ongoing support to improve their situation and follow children’s progress over time.
Through these systems, over 970,000 children in cocoa-farming households received support to prevent or address child labour – up from around 540,000 in 2023. Most of these children received preventative support, as early intervention is important to protect children from harm. One of the most effective support measures is targeted awareness raising, which helps households to better understand the dangers of certain hazardous tasks and the alternatives available.
Around 220,000 children found in child labour received targeted support to help them stop engaging in child labour. This kind of support includes targeted awareness raising and guidance, accelerated education to get children back to school, school uniforms and books, assistance obtaining a birth certificate, cash transfers to help families meet their needs, as well as investments in quality education, such as classroom renovations, school meals, or teacher training.
Ongoing challenges and next steps
By September 2024, the systems had identified 250 000 children in child labour, representing about 14% of the children registered in the systems. Most children in child labour in cocoa work on the family farm, doing hazardous tasks like carrying heavy loads or using sharp tools, and are combining work and school. Identifying these children is challenging, requiring skilled monitors, but it is crucial to providing targeted support.
“Child labour is a sensitive issue, and it’s likely that some cases still go undetected. We will need to ensure there is continued investment in training and supporting monitors, to help these systems to identify and assist more children over time,” Lange underlined.
When a child is identified in child labour, monitors should conduct regular visits to follow up on the child's progress and determine when additional support is needed. These follow-up visits are crucial for monitoring impact, enabling us to verify if children have stopped engaging in child labour and if out-of-school children have returned to school.
“Results show that not all systems are yet able to consistently perform and record results from follow-up visits, making it difficult to assess their impact. This area requires improvement moving forward, and as systems mature, we expect their ability to perform follow-up visits to improve” Lange added.
Shared responsibility
“ICI members’ efforts show that a great deal can be achieved when actors commit to scaling up evidence-based approaches,” Lange explained.
“While these efforts represent an important achievement, they represent only one part of what is needed to combat child labour in cocoa-producing countries. Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation in supply chains cannot solve child labour alone and must be complemented by investments to tackle the multiple root causes of child labour such as low farmer incomes, gender inequality and limited access to essential services.”
Read the full results of ICI’s Member Reporting Exercise - 2024.