Building Resilient Communities in the Fight Against Child Labour

The Challenge

Child labour is still common in developing countries. Subsistence farmers often rely on children to assist in agricultural tasks. This becomes a problem when the work is dangerous or puts children in harm’s way, is physically demanding, or denies children their rights to attend school or have free time for play. The underlying causes of child labour are frequently related to poverty, poor regulation and lack of awareness of the potential harm, as is the case in Sierra Leone.

We will be working in partnership with MAPCO to eliminate child labour from the supply chain. While palm oil companies have taken steps to eradicate child labour on company plantations, many child workers carry very heavy loads, use dangerous tools such as machetes on the smallholder’s farms. These types of activity pose the threat of physical harm to children. Children who are working are denied the opportunity of attending school or taking time to study, limiting their potential and jeopardizing their futures. Many farmers use their children to supplement labour on the farm to save costs and by doing so they deprive them of their right to education and a right to free time. At the same time, in some rural areas children simply do not have access to proper education facilities even when their parents want to send them to school.

Working with partners in the Palm Oil sector

At Action on Poverty, our priority is helping people to build a safe and lasting living, and we have always been bold and brave in our approach. We pursue what we know to be right and what we know to be effective, and we choose our partners carefully. We are open to working with businesses committed to improving their approach and finding real solutions to child labour, so when the opportunity arose to help hundreds of children live safer lives, pursue their education and fulfil their potential, we made the considered choice to partner with a palm oil company to achieve this.

We recognise that the production of Palm Oil can come at the cost of biodiversity loss and deforestation that may exacerbate climate change. Palm Oil remains one of the most useful and productive vegetable oils grown, and its global demand and production has increased rapidly over the past 50 years. Creating large-scale oil palm plantations can also lead to social conflict between companies, governments and communities over land tenure and usage rights. Labour and human rights abuses including forced and child labour can occur on plantations.

As awareness of the negative impacts of Palm Oil grows, government and organisations are not calling for a total boycott but are calling for the use of Palm Oil from suppliers with sustainability certification, and increased crop yields. The most well-known certification is the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which only 19% of global Palm Oil production is currently covered by. The RSPO was launched in 2004 and provides certification for suppliers who produce their crop in a more sustainable way by conducting impact assessments, managing high-value areas of biodiversity, not clearing primary forest and avoiding land clearance through fires. Suppliers can only be certified if their plantations have not replaced primary forest or areas rich in biodiversity since 2005.