Child labor monitoring and remediation

Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) have become increasingly valuable in helping us understand and tailor our interventions. They help us identify children at risk of, or in a situation of child labour, so that we can engage with families to improve and enable school attendance through training and facilitation of necessary certificates for example.

 

Drawing on best practices by the Fair Labor Association and the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), CLMRS has been scaled up to cover all nine of our direct cocoa sourcing countries, coffee in Guatemala, cashew in Nigeria and 100% of our hazelnut sustainability programmes in Turkey. To date, our CLMRS systems covers over 260,000 farmer households.

With training and the help of smartphones, field officers can collect detailed social data on communities and individual farming households, identifying children at risk and tailoring interventions based on the issues identified. We also continue to run deep dive risk assessments in the specific supply chains flagged as high risk at a sectoral level. This helps us understand the wider context and root causes of human rights violations and identify enablers for child protection and labour rights.

 

The unprecedented visibility provided by CLMRS and our household surveys help us focus our resources and collaborate with communities, local authorities, and other stakeholders to take preventative and remedial actions that help tackle the root causes. Effective and sustained remediation takes time and manpower and we are focused on testing new approaches and adapting our efforts based on evidence of what works best.