Resources

This report analyses the impact of the International Cocoa Initiative’s Community Development Programme on child labour and its severity in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. ICI’s Community Development Programme supported 75 cocoa-growing communities in both countries over four years, between 2015 and 2018, with the overall aim of improving these communities’ capacity to protect children.

The International Cocoa Initiative’s 2021-2026 Strategy acts as a road map to achieve scale-up of action within the cocoa sector. At ICI, we want to see cocoa-growing communities thrive within a dignified, sustainable and responsibly-managed cocoa supply chain, where child rights and human rights are protected and respected, where child labour and forced labour are eliminated.

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

ICI commissioned this evaluation in January 2019. It examines progress made since 2015 and aims to answer the question: to what extent are cocoa-growing communities more protective of children and their rights?

Improving access to education has long been considered an important means of combating child labour. But how important are the different elements of ‘education quality’? And which should be addressed first in order to reduce child labour? In fact, the evidence is limited. To help answer these questions, ICI conducted a study based on data from 258 cocoa-growing communities in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. The study explored the relationship between child labour and two elements of education quality: school infrastructure & services, and school management.