Collaborative on Global Children's Issues

Despite over two and a half decades of global commitments to eliminate child labor from cocoa production, approximately 1.5 million children remain engaged in cocoa farming in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Of those children, an estimated 95% still perform hazardous work such as carrying heavy loads, using machetes to split cocoa pods, or spraying toxic pesticides. These figures are not insignificant.

Together, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana produce roughly 60% of the world’s cocoa, which means that the multi-billion-dollar global chocolate industry depends heavily on cocoa grown by smallholder farmers in these two countries. Despite these multinational corporations' (MNCs) commitments to eliminating child labor from their supply chains, the structural conditions that give rise to hazardous child labor are still deeply ingrained within the industry. It has become increasingly clear that while years of industry pledges, public-private partnerships, certification systems, and monitoring tools have caused small changes, the overarching issue of child labor has not declined sufficiently. And while some pilots have proven effective and technical knowledge has been shared, systemic transformation has yet to occur.

The time for a shift in the child labor industry is now. As the United States federal government moves out of the international aid space and cancels over $500 million in grant programs that combat child labor and other labor issues, there is an opening for practitioners and researchers to re-evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of programs to make the changes necessary to ensure interventions adequately address the issue of child labor in the cocoa industry. This next phase must move beyond fragmented initiatives toward coordinated, enforceable, and evidence-based implementation that focuses on increasing children’s safety and long-term well-being and the eradication of child labor in the cocoa industry.

Historical Context

Cocoa farming expanded rapidly across West Africa in the twentieth century, particularly in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. As a crop, cocoa is highly labor-intensive. It requires sustained physical work such as harvesting pods, splitting them open, fermenting beans, drying them, and transporting sacks to collection points. Today, the sector consists largely of smallholder farmers who cultivate small plots of land, typically between five and 12 acres.

Most of these smallholder farmers live below the World Bank poverty line. In this context, farmers have limited capacity to hire laborers, nor do they have the type of infrastructure and access needed to reduce costs. As a result, families often rely on all available household members to meet these demands, including children.

Many children work alongside their parents, while some migrate internally or across borders in search of employment on cocoa farms. And while not all agricultural work performed by children constitutes exploitation, the widespread involvement of children in hazardous tasks (specifically those involving machetes, heavy loads, and exposure to agrochemicals) violates their rights. Coupled with little or no compensation, 80+ hour work weeks, malnutrition, and other forms of physical abuse, child labor in the cocoa industry is a human rights issue on a large scale.

The first major international acknowledgment of the child labor issue in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire came in 2001 with the Harkin-Engel Protocol. This protocol was a public, voluntary commitment between the U.S. government, local governments, major chocolate companies, and other stakeholders, with the focus on eliminating the worst forms of child labor in cocoa. Since then, the protocol has been revised multiple times, with deadlines extended and new frameworks introduced in an effort to move the industry closer to its stated goals. The most recent version, the 2024 Framework of Action, renewed these commitments; however, the core objectives of the original agreement have still not been met.

Over time, awareness of child labor in the cocoa sector has grown, and technical tools to address it have become more sophisticated; however, the underlying economic reality that drives the problem remains the same. Voluntary industry initiatives have led to meaningful progress in certain areas, but they have not been scaled to the necessary levels in order to address the systemic issue of child labor in the cocoa industry.

Economics and Poverty

One of the biggest factors contributing to the persistence of hazardous child labor in cocoa production is poverty. The average income of cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana is well below global living standards. Even during price spikes in 2024, most smallholder farmers do not earn enough to meet the needs of their families.

In 2019, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana introduced the Living Income Differential (LID), adding $400 per metric ton to cocoa exports to raise farmers’ incomes, address poverty, and reduce child labor. While hailed as a positive, progressive way to address these issues, the implementation's success has depended on a wide variety of other factors within the supply chain. Additionally, even when the implementation is successful, the projected increase in income of approximately 20–30% falls short of the approximately 90–110% needed to reach living income benchmarks in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Because child labor is driven in part by chronic poverty, small farm size, low productivity, and limited diversification, these modest price premiums alone are unlikely to reduce households’ reliance on children’s labor. Addressing child labor, therefore, requires structural reforms alongside price interventions.

Geographic and Service Challenges

Many cocoa-growing communities are in remote areas with limited access to roads, inadequate school systems, and little to no health infrastructure. These service delivery gaps exacerbate the issue of child labor. Additionally, birth registration gaps complicate child protection efforts. Without formal documentation, monitoring systems struggle to track age, location, and school enrollment as children live outside of the necessary systems to access services. Oftentimes, the systems designed for child protection may overlook children in isolated areas. As such, any effective shifts in the current status quo of implementation must ensure that rural infrastructure, teacher recruitment, school feeding programs, and other local service delivery are scaled appropriately.

Trafficking and Migration Issues

While much of the child labor in cocoa takes place on small, family-run farms, trafficking and migrant child labor persist. Cross-border migration between Burkina Faso, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire has impacted the cocoa sector for decades, and periods of economic instability or conflict in neighboring countries often increase the number of migrants.

Child trafficking is notoriously difficult to measure, but evidence suggests it continues in certain regions. Weak enforcement capacity, limited resources, and porous borders make meaningful oversight difficult. Child labor prevention in the cocoa industry must then ensure that broader interventions address challenges of trafficking, especially through strengthening migrant and birth registration and labor inspection processes.

Current Landscape

For over two decades, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (US DOL) Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) played an essential role in funding key programs and research and in convening key actors within the cocoa industry to combat child labor. The U.S. has funded grants and independent research projects like the NORC reports, led technical engagement with West African governments, and helped align corporate, governmental, and civil society actors around measurable targets. While the U.S. hasn’t left the space entirely, recent reductions in U.S. federal engagement on this issue risk weakening communication at a time when heightened coordination is needed to reduce duplicity and ensure accountability.

Other initiatives led by the cocoa companies have persisted. Major chocolate companies participate in platforms such as the World Cocoa Foundation and currently conduct a variety of programming within their respective supply chains. The majority of their engagement has focused on expanding tracing systems that track farmers, plots, and the path of cocoa throughout its use and production. While this can be effective in increasing visibility about the issue of child labor, tracing cocoa does not automatically ensure that children are removed from the labor force. Additionally, chocolate companies have worked on certification systems, and audits are periodic and easy to dodge. Overall, while these efforts have improved detection, to this day, companies acknowledge that they cannot guarantee their chocolate is free from child labor.

Companies are not the only ones working to end child labor. More promising enforcement efforts exist on the multilateral front. The EU recently adopted the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). This directive requires large corporations operating in the EU market to identify, prevent, and mitigate negative impacts on human rights in their supply chains. This directive has been widely viewed as a turning point toward mandatory human rights due diligence, as it could create legally enforceable accountability for companies. However, shortly after passage, the directive was placed under revision, and observers anticipate that the enforcement mechanisms and scope may be narrowed.

At the national level, the Ivorian and Ghanaian governments face fiscal and political constraints that complicate necessary reforms. Often, the federal systems tasked with addressing this issue are under-resourced. Rural education systems struggle with teacher shortages, and social protection systems are limited in coverage, especially in areas where child labor is most prevalent. Without coordinated investment across these state institutions, corporate monitoring or international involvement alone cannot eliminate child labor in the cocoa industry.

Lastly, and most promisingly, non-profit organizations funded largely by individual chocolate companies, though there has been a small degree of work through the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), have helped pilot tools that have proven effective, like the Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS). CLMRS are community-based monitoring systems designed to proactively identify children engaged in hazardous work and connect their families to support services, such as school enrollment, birth registration, or income assistance. Instead of relying on infrequent audits of program implementation, as with other child labor reduction efforts, CLMRS deploy local facilitators and cooperative staff to conduct regular household and farm visits, assess children’s work or school statuses, record the data, and facilitate alternative remediation efforts when child labor issues come up. The most critical aspect of CLMRS is that cases are tracked over a longer period of time, which helps show the successes or failures of remediation efforts. When these CLMRS initiatives are implemented consistently and paired with genuine remediation efforts, evidence shows that hazardous child labor can decline within those supply chains. The largest barrier to these systems, however, is that they haven’t been scaled. At present, implementers don’t coordinate, and as a result, CLMRS are underfunded and unevenly applied rather than integrated into national systems. Ultimately, many farmers in more remote or rural communities are not reached.

Recommendations

Institutionalize and Scale CLMRS

The governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana should formally integrate CLMRS into national child protection and labor inspection systems. In Côte d’Ivoire, the Comité National de Surveillance des Actions de Lutte contre la Traite, l’Exploitation et le Travail des Enfants (CNS) should lead the charge in coordinating domestic CLMRS within existing child protection efforts. In Ghana, this should be led in coordination with the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations (MELR) and COCOBOD. By codifying CLMRS monitoring standards into national law, local governments would be able to enforce higher-level standards of monitoring to prevent child labor. Additionally, if the EU CSDDD holds, international due diligence regulations would force compliance for multinational firms and incentivize them to work more efficiently toward risk mitigation and child labor reduction.

Additionally, since the ICI has been technically engaged in CLMRS, it can assist with technical support for scaling up the CLMRS to a national level. Rather than having each company operate its own CLMRS, the ICI could harmonize existing indicators, thresholds, and reporting standards in order to create standard monitoring protocols, tailored facilitator training curricula, and common definitions for legal standards for national legislation in both countries. The ICI has already started to standardize and align these indicators; however, it has resulted in reducing the ambition of those participating CLMRS. By standardizing these indicators, the ICI has reduced reporting metrics to minimum standards and focused on basic support rather than quality remediation or substantial structural change to the industry. As such, the ICI should strengthen its collaboration with the CNS, the MELR, and international donors to create joint evaluation mechanisms without compromising on quality metrics to increase transparency and accountability of companies and governments in the implementation of CLMRS. Overall, this would help scale CLMRS to a national level and ultimately integrate child protection infrastructure into existing institutions.

Strengthen Coordination

Admittedly, this is an expensive proposition. However, it will be far more costly if resources are continuously directed at the problem without coordination. As seen previously, the industry has already spent more than $70 million over the course of just one decade combating child labor without systemic, sustained success. This suggests that isolated funding and programmatic efforts do not actually translate into the systemic impact needed for eradicating child labor in the cocoa industry. Companies like Mars have made commitments to expand CLMRS systems within their own supply chains, but there hasn’t been an independent review of their progress since then, and the larger industrial chains aren’t included in their commitment.

Instead, if companies pooled their resources together using pre-existing coalitions such as the World Cocoa Foundation, these investments could be coordinated more efficiently, the most effective interventions could be scaled more broadly, and efforts could focus on sustained remediation rather than disjointed pilot programs. To strengthen coordination and resource bases further, the CNS in Côte d’Ivoire, the MELR in Ghana, the US DOL, and multilateral institutions like UNICEF could provide advisory support and direction, supported by their ongoing research and development. This would ensure that CLMRS systems are deployed in collaboration with host countries and guided and revised as needed based on available data.

Poverty and Structural Reform

Poverty is still the primary structural driver of child labor. Comprehensive poverty graduation programs across the entire cocoa industry would be the most effective route to eliminating reliance on child labor. However, these types of large-scale, costly programs may not be feasible given resource constraints, the current political climate, and current cocoa market volatility. As such, support for poverty reduction should be a key part of CLMRS remediation. Interventions such as income diversification, productivity training, and education are all essential pieces to reduce vulnerability for families. While CLMRS cannot resolve structural poverty issues alone, they can function as an entry point for economic growth opportunities in vulnerable communities down the road.

Conclusion

Overall, the fact that child labor persists in the cocoa industry reflects structural poverty, weak rural services, uneven monitoring, and fragmented governance. Over the past 25 years, we have grown our technical capacity and small-scale, effective programs. However, the next phase of reform must move past isolated pilots and voluntary pledges. Institutionalized, coordinated, and evidence-based implementation is essential.

Bringing CLMRS into national institutions, strengthening coordination between stakeholders, and integrating poverty reduction incrementally into CLMRS remediation are strong steps toward sustainable progress. This approach can move the cocoa industry beyond symbolic commitments and deliver measurable, long-lasting change for children and their families.

Rachel Kern (G‘26) graduated from the Master of Science in Foreign Service (MSFS) program at Georgetown University in May 2026.