For Ivorian police commissioner Luc Zaka, this year was an especially good one. He and his team rescued more than 1,750 children from harsh work on the country’s cocoa plantations, and helped put several traffickers behind bars.
“We had to do everything possible to ensure our cocoa is quality cocoa that is not produced by children,” said Zaka, who heads a specialist unit fighting child labor in Ivory Coast — the world’s biggest cocoa supplier.
Named International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, this year was meant to boost such efforts to stamp out the practice.
However, despite some success stories such as Zaka’s, global progress was patchy and COVID-19 fueled abuses, experts say.
In Ivory Coast, where close to 1 million children still work in the cocoa sector, rescue operations have multiplied in the past few years, following pressure over labor exploitation from EU lawmakers and ethically minded chocolate consumers.
In May, Ivorian authorities carried out their biggest ever raid, leading to the arrest of about 25 child traffickers, Zaka said by telephone.
Five of them were later given 20-year jail sentences.
“This is a strong signal from the government to make sure this doesn’t continue. Other large-scale operations will follow,” he said.
Many of the children working on Ivorian cocoa farms are trafficked from neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, where conflict has exacerbated the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and driven more children into work.
Even before the virus shut schools and fueled poverty worldwide, child labor had increased for the first time in 20 years, UN agencies have said.
The number of child laborers last year rose to 160 million from 152 million in 2016, the UN said earlier this year, with the sharpest growth in Africa — already home to most of the world’s child workers.
While many nations have taken important steps to crack down on underage work, governments must redouble their efforts, said Benjamin Smith, a child labor specialist at the International Labour Organization.
“Policymakers took their eye off the ball to one degree or another, and we need renewed focus and resources and creative ideas, but there’s a lot of headwinds,” Smith said, speaking of a lack of job creation and the challenges of boosting education access in Africa.
The private sector, trade unions and civil society groups should also play a bigger role in helping meet a global goal to eradicate child labor by 2025, he added.
‘WE HAVE IDEAS’
However, a lack of funds often hampers their initiatives.
In the northeastern province of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), it was a shortage of financial support that scuppered Augustin Bedidjo’s efforts to fight child labor in mines through his grassroots charity.
Bedidjo created comic strips translated into local languages to distribute to parents, officials and mine operators to raise awareness of the dangers of mining — considered one of the worst forms of child labor by the UN.
His visual stories highlighted the dangers faced by children working in and around the mines, including sexual abuse and bonded labor, but he was unable to raise enough money from donors to distribute the comics and the project is now on hold.
“As a local organization, we have ideas, initiatives, but ... we have no funds to carry out our actions,” Bedidjo said by telephone.
The pandemic pushed more children into the country’s mines, which produce metals, including gold and the cobalt used in electric vehicles and smartphone batteries, he said, adding that many are at increased risk of forced labor and marriage.
“When schools were closed, children who were attending school were drawn into the mining activities and most of these children did not return ... The impact is noticeable to this day,” he said.
‘HUGE SETBACKS’
Without urgent action, another 8.9 million children around the world could become child laborers by the end of next year, the UN has said.
“This year we’ve seen huge setbacks in the effort to end child labor, primarily because of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch.
She urged governments to use the same strategies that allowed them to make breakthroughs in reducing child labor between 2000 and 2016 to reverse the pandemic’s effect.
“Three things contributed to that success — expanding children’s access to education, providing cash transfers or child allowances [monthly stipends] to families, and strong child labor laws that are effectively enforced,” she said.
The UN target to end child labor within four years, which critics have said is impractical and unrealistic, could face added pressure from a surge in demand for cobalt as nations seek to reduce their carbon emissions by shifting to electric vehicles.
Demand for cobalt is expected to grow fourfold by 2030, with about 70 percent of the metal produced in the DR Congo’s mines — sometimes by children in the large informal mining sector.
“The world is trying to become more sustainable, but by default, it may mean that we are harming people, and more specifically, children,” said Benafsha Delgado, senior program manager at UN Global Compact, which encourages firms to adopt sustainable policies.
A cobalt mining rush would lead to a rise in the number of children working in the mines and push more girls into sexual exploitation in mining hubs, she added.
RECOGNITION NEEDED
A survey by charity Save The Children Germany of more than 400 artisanal miners and children in the DR Congo’s southern Lualaba Province found that nearly one-third of children were not in school and one in six were working.
Companies must recognize artisanal mining, which accounts for 15 to 30 percent of Congolese production, in their supply chain and push for formalization, Save The Children Germany sustainable supply chains manager Anna Thinius said.
“What’s happened in the last years is that companies try to de-risk and disengage from artisanal and small-scale mining to basically protect themselves, because there’s been quite a lot of media attention in terms of human rights violations,” she said.
“That doesn’t solve the situation because, in the end, artisanal small-scale mined cobalt always ends up in the supply chain of big companies, because it’s mixed and you can’t trace it very well,” Thinius said.
For Delgado, an EU push for mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence would make it hard for European companies to turn a blind eye to child labor and other rights violations in their supply chains.
“This is a really good year for companies to take addressing child labor seriously,” she said. “If they’re going to ever do anything meaningful, this is the time to do it.”
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