Finding child labour means fixing it

Let’s not get it twisted.. child labour is a horrendous fact of a broken chocolate industry. 1.56m children work illegally on cocoa farms in Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire. This is what we exist to change. And the good news is, our 5 Sourcing Principles work. Proactively looking for child labour in your supply chain means you can fix it, and that means change is happening. 

The average rate of child labour in the chocolate industry is 46.5% (1 in 2 children working illegally). At the farmer cooperatives we partner with, who implement our 5 Sourcing Principles, this rate drops to 3.9%. Progress!  

More cases than last year? Yep. To make more impact we worked with more farmer partners this year to source cocoa. This means more farmers earning more money for their cocoa, but also means the process for identifying, remediating and preventing child labour started from scratch again here, so the child labour rate was at the industry average. We found 1,701 cases of child labour last year and we plan to remediate all of those cases this year. And in time we expect the rate to drop at these cooperatives too. PS. This isn’t new news.. we are transparent about these figures year-round. 

What about the rest of the 1.56m cases you may ask? Well, that’s down to the biggest players to take FULL responsibility for their supply chains.  We strongly invite all choco companies to adopt our 5 sourcing principles and join us in making 100% slave free the norm in chocolate.