Chocolate for a break from work, or cocoa for a breather. What if the cacao used as a raw material was harvested by children who worked in exchange for the time they were supposed to spend at school? In order to protect children’s educational opportunities, an initiative to eradicate child labor using blockchain technology has begun in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa, the world’s largest cocoa-producing country.
Number of child laborers in each region of the world and child laborers as a percentage of all children
One in five children engaged in labor. The reality of child labor on the rise in Africa
One in ten children in the world – that’s the rate of child labor estimated by the International Labor Organization (ILO). In Africa, where it is the highest, it is 1 in 5. Seventy percent of the world’s working children are engaged in the agricultural sector, producing cacao and coffee beans, and most of them are engaged in domestic labor, helping their parents instead of going to school. Child labor, which deprives children of educational opportunities, is now a global problem, and while it has been decreasing in Asia Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean since 2016, it is rather increasing in Sub-Saharan Africa.
One of the major problems of child labor is that children cannot go to school. Children who are deprived of educational opportunities have their chances of obtaining a job that will provide sufficient income in the future greatly limited.
In Cote d’Ivoire, which accounts for 43% of the world’s cacao production, it is reported that 38% of children aged 5-17 in cacao-producing households are engaged in child labor related to cacao production (Note 1). There are various causes of child labor, but from the producer’s point of view, there are many small family-run farms that rely on children for labor, and the practice has been passed down from generation to generation. Another major factor is that as consumers demand cheaper products, cost-cutting efforts are passed on to producers, resulting in lower incomes for farmers.
Note 1:
Children attending school in rural areas. While the elementary school enrollment rate in Abidjan, the largest city in Côte d’Ivoire, is 91.1% and the secondary school enrollment rate is 62.4%, the enrollment rate in rural areas is lower: 74.1% in elementary school and 38.5% in secondary schools. (From the Integrated regional survey on employment and the informal sector 2017; both photos are from Ganyoa, south-central Côte d’Ivoire)
Children taking classes at school. The literacy rate in Côte d’Ivoire for those aged 15 and older was very low at 43.9% in 2014 statistics, but has improved significantly to 89.9% in 2019. However, there are still many people in rural areas who cannot read and write. (UNESCO Institute of Statistics: http://uis.unesco.org/en/country/ciより)
What is a blockchain-based child labor deterrent system?
In order to eliminate child labor, it is important to make the production process of cacao transparent and to make buyers such as exporters, retailers, and consumers aware of issues on the producer side such as child labor and farmer poverty. Then, buyers who are aware of the issues on the production site are encouraged to purchase sustainable cacao with a premium (incentive) price. Paying this premium to farmers who do not engage in child labor will improve farmers’ incomes. If children free from child labor go to school and receive an education, it will also improve their future quality of life.
In order to create such a chain of happiness, JICA has established a child labor monitoring system that utilizes blockchain. In order to make the current situation of child labor transparent, the farmers and schools involved first enter the existence of child labor and school attendance into a database. The monitoring team then checks whether the information has been entered correctly. The local operator determines from the information in the database that child labor is not being used, and purchases such cacao at a premium price to deter child labor. By utilizing blockchain, the system protects the reliability of the information shared. Blockchain is a system that allows many participants to share the same data in a distributed manner. It is characterized by its high transparency and low cost of operation, as registered data is extremely difficult to falsify and cannot be erased.
The current state of the supply chain and the goal of the supply chain. In the current situation (left figure), information channels between producers such as farmers and purchasers such as retailers are not interconnected, making it difficult for purchasers to track information from the producer side and to grasp problems in the production area. The goal is a circular supply chain where the producer and buyer sides share information in real time, as shown in the figure on the right. Blockchain technology will be used to ensure traceability (traceability of distribution) while preserving information.
Ganyoa, 140 kilometers southwest of Yamoussoukro, the capital of Cote d’Ivoire. Here, JICA, in collaboration with Deloitte Tohmatsu Group, conducted a month-long demonstration of a system for monitoring child labor starting in November 2021. The participants were farmers who are the parents of the children, groups to which the farmers belong, teachers and schools, and the monitoring team. The monitoring team consisted of members of the NGO Beyond Beans, which aims to eradicate child labor in cocoa cultivation in West Africa.
First, school teachers enter the children’s attendance and farmer group representatives enter the presence or absence of child labor on their farms into the database. If the two are inconsistent, the monitoring team confirms the facts through interviews with both parties and field visits, and corrects the information. For farmer groups with low incidence of child labor and high school attendance, local operators purchase cocoa beans at a higher price. At the same time, schools receive compensation from the operators in the form of maintenance and renovation of school facilities, enhanced school lunches, and educational materials in exchange for accurate information input. As an incentive in this demonstration, the project team provided cash or mobile money to the farmer groups on behalf of the operators, and school supplies to the schools. Retailers and consumers did not participate in this demonstration experiment, but in the future, the database can be accessed through QR codes or other means attached to the products, allowing the purchasers to check the information registered with the database. By utilizing blockchain technology in the database, producers and buyers can share highly reliable information. It is also expected that this blockchain mechanism will be extended to provide financial services (payment, lending) available to farmers.
Data input and incentive flow in a blockchain system
A farmer group leader receives a terminal for data entry. He holds cacao nuts in both hands.
Monitoring team checking database information at the terminal
I want my child to go to school. A common desire makes the demonstration experiment a success.
Miwa Ono of Deloitte Tohmatsu Consulting, who was in charge of the field survey, says, “The farmers and schools we asked to cooperate in the experiment were very cooperative. In addition to their curiosity about being exposed to something new, many of them were actually interested in not allowing child labor to take place. To begin with, with global awareness of child labor increasing in recent years, companies selling chocolate need to show that they use cacao harvested without child labor. Therefore, Western companies have been working on programs to eliminate child labor and to improve farmers’ income. The government of Cote d’Ivoire is also aware of the need to eliminate child labor, and is taking measures such as regularly announcing the status of child labor monitored by NGOs and resident volunteers who patrol the farmland. In the case of this demonstration experiment, the farm management company was implementing a program to prevent child labor in the area, and it seems that awareness of this program had spread among the farmers as well.
The results of the demonstration experiment proved the effectiveness of the system. The application rate from farmer groups was 100%. The application rate from schools also reached 95.6%. In cases where the information from both parties did not match, the monitoring team interviewed children and parents, who confirmed that most of the errors were due to input or application errors. Child labor was revealed in 3 of the 2,366 applications, with the exception of 103 unapplied applications that were due to the school’s communication environment or work overload.
Kojiro Fujino, Director of JICA’s Cote d’Ivoire Office, who was involved in the survey, commented on the results, “We have a feeling that this system is technically usable. Compared to the conventional method that relies on manpower, this system can monitor child labor more efficiently and accurately, and we believe it will increase the reliability of child labor reporting,” he said. In the first place, the truth is that farmers want to send their children to school, and their children want to go to school too. Education is necessary to improve their lives. Without labor, they can go to school. It’s important to design incentives for that.”
Mr. Ono (third from left in lower row) and the survey team pose for a photo with farmers who participated in the demonstration experiment.
Mr. Fujino (center) interviews a farmer in front of a pile of cacao beans.
To create a sustainable system that creates a chain of happiness
Some issues were revealed by the survey. With the application used in this study, some data could not be entered depending on the communication environment. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the application so that daily data can be registered on the terminal while being uploaded onto the system when the user leaves an area with a good communication environment. In addition, in order to keep the system in operation, it is important to provide incentives for farmers who do not engage in child labor to improve their income, i.e., buy-in at a premium price.
A consumer survey conducted in Japan in parallel with the pilot study revealed that teenagers were the most willing to purchase sustainable chocolate. A certain number of teenagers were willing to spend 1.2 to 2 times more. However, the overall awareness of sustainability is low among all age groups, so it is necessary to raise awareness among a wider range of people and encourage them to purchase more sustainable products at a premium. This will then be returned to the farmers’ income and protect their children’s educational opportunities. The goal is to create such a chain of happiness.
Among sustainable chocolate purchasers in Japan, the percentage of those who check for the sustainable certification mark at the time of purchase, by age group, is significantly higher among teenagers than among other age groups, with nearly half of teenagers indicating that they check for the mark before making a purchase. (Based on a web-based survey conducted from October 29 to November 1, 2021. (From a web-based survey conducted from October 29 to November 1, 2021, targeting at least 100 people in each age group from teens aged 15 and older to 70 and older, for a total of 1,400 people)
Government agencies and companies in Côte d’Ivoire have expressed interest in this system as a new method of monitoring child labor, based on the results of the experiment, and the possibility of implementation is being considered. If this system is implemented with prior programs to eliminate child labor and efforts to improve farmers’ income, it is expected that a sustainable and good society will be realized where children do not have to engage in child labor and can attend school with peace of mind.
Motoji Wakabayashi, Deputy Director of JICA’s Africa Division, said that blockchain-based traceability systems will spread to various areas in the future.
We can protect human rights by recording the origin of mineral resources and timber and distributing products free of human rights issues and injustice, and we can also cooperate to prevent corruption by making administrative procedures transparent on the blockchain. Technology is an important tool to overcome many challenges in Africa, and JICA will continue to provide cooperation connecting social issues and technology.”
© Source JICA
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