Advancing Decent Work to End Child Labour in Supply Chains
The 13th annual meeting of the ILO’s Child Labour Platform took place on December 2022 in Geneva. The meeting was a great opportunity to bring together businesses across sectors, as well as representatives of employers’, workers’, and international organizations.
The CLP aims at advancing decent work to end child labour in supply chains. This year’s programme focused on business responses to tacking the systemic root cause of child labour from adequate wages and income, equal opportunities for women and youth employment. The meeting also advanced the collaboration of the CLP with businesses at country level, with a focus on Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India.
Some of the discussions included thematic panels on effective child labour due diligence, raising wages and income to eliminate dependence on child labour, strategies to empower women and girls in the lower tiers of supply chains social justice, and navigating the intersection between eliminating child labour and promoting youth employment in supply chains.
The ECLT Foundation had the pleasure of being part in the interactive discussion with the members of the Child Labour Platform. Having been involved in the fight against child labour in agriculture in Africa and other regions of the world since 2000, the ECLT Foundation reiterates its vision for a world with thriving agricultural communities, where children are free of child labour.
In this sense, ECLT calls for action in three key areas:
• The creation of national coalitions linked to the International Partnership for Cooperation on Child Labour in Agriculture. National coalitions could be piloted in selected Pathfinder countries for the purpose of testing agriculture-wide approaches to eliminate child labour – including in subsectors linked to global, regional, domestic and local supply chains, and to address the needs of families engaged in subsistence farming.
• Call to action for multinational and national enterprises, agricultural boards, producer organizations, commodity associations and traders across agriculture to implement the relevant terms of the ILO Tripartite Declaration on Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy and with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and to ensure full integration of decent work, including the eradication of child labour, into their business activities, including by adopting Good Agricultural Practices, regardless of the destination markets for agricultural produce.
• Strengthening small producers’ organizations, including mobilizing funding to enable them to reduce dependence on family labour, upgrade in different value chains and negotiate for fair prices.