Coffee

The She Thrives project seeks to build agency of vulnerable women and girls in the Ethiopian agricultural sector, change community social norms and traditions that uphold child labor and gender inequality, and transform laws, policies and institutions to be more gender equitable and support efforts to reduce child labor in Ethiopia.

EQUAL seeks to increase job quality and safety, create opportunities for economic participation, and address gaps in social programs to reach remote and impoverished families in Mexico.

This project helps businesses establish systems to prevent, detect and eliminate child labor and other forms of labor exploitation from their supply chains. It is assembling a powerful coalition of coffee buyers to collectively incentivize compliance among suppliers. In doing so, the project promotes supply chains that are free of exploitative labor and helps to create a fair playing field for workers in the U.S. and around the world.

Colombia Avanza is building the capacity of civil society to more effectively combat child labor and other labor abuses in Colombia’s coffee sector. By raising awareness and connecting survivors of labor exploitation to services in two of the largest coffee-producing areas of Colombia, the project helps promote supply chains that are free of exploitative labor and that contribute to a fair playing field for workers in the U.S. and around the world.

This project builds the capacity of the government and businesses to expand and better coordinate ongoing labor trafficking enforcement efforts in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. By putting the right tools in the hands of labor inspectors, business owners, workers, and service providers, the project will advance greater supply chain transparency and accountability.

The United States is the leading importer of coffee, accounting for over 18 percent of total coffee imports in the world, with Brazil and Colombia as the top suppliers. But before that coffee reaches our cups, tens of millions of workers globally select, pick, and process the beans. Many of those workers are children – toiling in the fields rather than learning in school.

Campos de Esperanza (Fields of Hope) engages the government, the private sector, and civil society to reduce child labor in migrant agricultural communities, particularly in the coffee and sugarcane sectors in Veracruz and Oaxaca. The project links children and youth to existing educational programs and refers vulnerable households to existing government programs to improve income and reduce the need for child labor.

Project Objectives: To improve educational outcomes for child and adolescents involved in child labor; and improve family income so that households do not need to rely on the work of children for survival.