Resources

The International Labour Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund have released a new brief, Covid-19 and child labour: A time of crisis, a time to act, outlining the risk of a rise in child labour due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this external evaluation, the results of the Eliminating Child Labor in Cocoa are presented alongside the key learnings from the project.

Cash transfers are increasingly used as a way of addressing poverty across the world. Evidence shows that they can have a positive impact on children’s welfare, improving access to education, nutrition, health and material wellbeing. However, much less is known about their impact on child labour. To fill this evidence gap, the International Cocoa Initiative conducted a review of evidence on how cash transfers affect child labour. The study is part of an ongoing project with Nestlé and ECOM, supported by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO).

This paper steps back from dominant discourses around child labour, and examines how we can arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the forms, prevalence, drivers, and dynamics of child work - particularly work that is harmful. The authors aim to open space for new discourses, strategies, and interventions with which children’s harmful work in agriculture might be addressed.

ICI’s Understanding Child Labour Risk study identified a limited set of community characteristics, which can be collected easily and at low cost, that can be used to predict a community’s child labour risk. The research team produced two, country-specific models – one for Côte d’Ivoire and one for Ghana – which can be used to identify and target the most vulnerable communities for support. By answering a few simple questions, a community can be classified in one of three categories: lower, medium or higher risk of child labour. Data collection tools were developed using KoBo Toolbox and are