MATE MASIE – Making Advances to Eliminate Child Labor in More Areas with Sustainable Integrated Efforts
Print
The MATE MASIE project seeks to strengthen capacity, connections, and accountability across child labor enforcement and monitoring within cocoa cooperatives. It works to build the capacity of cocoa cooperatives to support vulnerable member households directly and by linking their members with other service providers.
The Problem
Ghana is a major producer of cocoa, with approximately 800,000 families relying on cocoa for their livelihoods. Cocoa production is labor intensive, and working on cocoa farms can be hazardous, particularly for children whose physical, mental, and psychological capacities are still developing. The informal nature of cocoa production represents one of the challenges to effective monitoring and prevention of child labor.
Efforts are needed to improve the capacity of cocoa cooperatives to monitor for child labor, build linkages and cooperation with enforcement authorities, and enhance the provision of social services to households with children at risk of child labor. There is also a need to empower civil society and communities to play an active role in efforts to reduce the prevalence of child labor in cocoa production.
Our Strategy
The MATE MASIE project aims to increase the number of cocoa cooperatives demonstrating a reduction of child labor in the cocoa supply chain by implementing activities to:
- Improve accountability of cocoa cooperatives to monitor child labor in the cocoa supply chain and facilitate government enforcement of child labor laws; and
- Strengthen partnerships to increase support to vulnerable households within cocoa cooperatives and provide access to child labor remediation programs.
MATE MASIE is collaborating with cocoa cooperatives and other stakeholders to support a locally developed farm-to-cooperative traceability system for child labor. MATE MASIE’s work is supporting a replicable pathway for child labor monitoring and service provision by cooperatives to pave the way for broader adoption of best practices on monitoring and enforcement. This work involves building capacity among government enforcement authorities at district and community levels, strengthening monitoring systems of cocoa cooperatives with significant and diverse farmer reach, and improving coordination and referral structures among service providers so that their interconnected roles mutually reinforce one another to become more effective in eliminating child labor in the cocoa sector.
Results
- The project developed and is administering its Cooperative Participatory Assessment Tool (C-PAT). The C-PAT is a self-assessment tool developed by Winrock to enable the MATE MASIE project’s grantee cooperatives to identify gaps and needed support for capacity development to address child labor in the cocoa supply chain and to measure progress against initial benchmarks. The tool’s overarching objective is to improve cooperatives’ organizational capacity in relation to reducing child labor in Ghana.
- As of September 2023, 252 individuals have been trained at the district and community levels. This includes labor inspectors who trained as trainers and cocoa cooperative representatives who trained in monitoring child labor and traceability systems and in direct service planning and management. 100 percent of trainees demonstrated an increased understanding of child labor related laws and policies.
- The project has developed 4 district-specific capacity strengthening action plans and 4 cooperation frameworks for government monitoring and enforcement agencies.
- 171 members of vulnerable households have received social protection and/or child labor remediation services provided by either the cocoa cooperatives or external organizations to which they were referred.
- MATE MASIE has rolled out the Child Labor Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS) across all four cocoa cooperatives to identify children engaged in child labor, as well as a child labor risk management tool to guide the provision of social protection and remediation services.
- The project collaborated with Ghana’s Ministry of Employment and Labor Relations to organize a national stakeholder workshop to validate the New Ghana Accelerated Action Plan Against Child Labour 2023-2027. This led to its successful launch on June 12, 2023.
- Grantee:
- Winrock International
- Contact Information:
- globalkids@ilab.dol.gov / Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking (OCFT)
- Tags:
- Child Labor
- Agriculture
- Capacity Building
- Co-op
- Cocoa
- Cooperative
- FY20 Projects
- Ghana
- Supply Chains
- Traceability
