ICRAWE has been deeply engaged in child rights and business issues, working directly with primary producers to improve working conditions and the wellbeing of adult workers and children.
One of our core service areas has been the prevention and remediation of child labour. This is, in some ways, not something we’ve foreseen. Years ago, many of us working in the cocoa industry were positive that child labour was a thing of the past.
The thought was that, the efforts by the regulatory bodies and buying companies had at least achieved a reduction in child labour cases among their suppliers.
This optimism was founded in a continued drop in child labour cases: cocoa companies were reporting very few cases of child labour in their public CSR reports, while authoritative voices on child labour like the ILO were also pointing towards a continuous decrease in child labour numbers in their annual reports.
ICRAWE’s experience has shown that this optimism was premature. What looked like success was at least in parts just a shifting of the problem – that is, avoiding child labour in key first-tier suppliers and often pushing it to lower tiers, subcontractors, and more informal areas of the supply chain. We realised that most cocoa companies were quite content with a "we do not accept child labour" approach but had no systems in place to understand child labour risks throughout their supply chains, did not know how to tackle the challenge more systematically, and only rarely had actual processes in place to remediate child labour should it be found.
The systematic gaps became even more evident when some companies started to move from mainly compliance-driven approaches to more systematic human rights impact assessments and invested more in understanding their supply chain beyond Tier 1. Every child rights risk assessment conducted by ICRAWE with the aim of looking at the supply chain from raw materials to product identified child labour or a very high risk thereof, indicating that child labour remains a risk and challenge for most companies with international supply chains.
While a substantial number of companies are still holding on to the “we do not accept child labour” mantra, many have taken the education and embarked on journeys to look at the issue more analytically, making budgets available to both better understand the risk and carry the costs needed to ensure a child-centric child labour remediation programme.
After setting up a systematic child labour remediation service, ICRAWE has dealt with over 43 cases of child labour that have supported out-of-school children to return to education. ICRAWE has set up to improve their child labour prevention and remediation policies – moving from a zero-tolerance approach to one that seeks to understand the risks and instances of child labour and tackle it proactively. While there is no easy, one-size-fits-all formula for tackling child labour, we have seen how companies make this shift by closely examining the risks and gaps in their supply chain through human and child rights risk assessments, strengthening their child labour remediation policies and ensuring that all staff visiting supply chains know how to act and what immediate steps to take should child labour or risks thereof be found. This shift also goes hand in hand with a change in attitude where finding child labour is no longer considered a sign of “failure” but a sign of functioning monitoring and due diligence processes.
These are positive and encouraging developments, but they do not mean we have it figured out. Child labour is basically linked to deep-rooted issues: poverty, migration, lack of access to education, etc. And while it is of course true that the private sector will not be able to solve child labour on its own and that collaboration amongst many actors, in particular with governments, is needed, companies with international supply chains can still do a lot more.
If we really want to tackle child labour and other key human rights risks in companies’ supply chains, we need to start thinking about the sourcing and production risks at each step of the way in a more sustainable and effective way.
These include transparently and proactively acknowledging child labour within supply chains and making more considerate product and sourcing decisions that factor in the cost of a fair living wage and decent working conditions for those involved in the production process. The key needed measures also include increasing visibility and traceability, commitment to allocating enough funding and resources from top leadership within companies to build robust prevention and remediation mechanisms, shifting resources to support the primary producers, and directly engaging with the farming communities.
Many companies are still a long way from putting these ideas into practice, and the ongoing supply chain challenges triggered by the pandemic and climate change-related disasters will make many of the tasks even harder. It is important that we are aware of this formidable challenge ahead of us and understand that very critical action and rough decisions will be needed if we want to be serious about tackling child labour in our supply chain.