By Eunice Hilda Ampomah, GNA
Accra, Nov. 22, GNA – The International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), a Foundation that promotes child protection in cocoa growing areas, has called on government to strengthen its partnership with the private sector to fight against child labour in those areas.
Mr Nick Weatherill, the Executive Director of ICI, made the call at the Foundation’s Annual Stakeholder Meeting held in Accra to enable stakeholders to share knowledge, opportunities and challenges they faced, while working together to promote child protection within a sustainable cocoa supply-chain.
The Meeting was on the theme, “Reinforcing Public-Private Collaboration to tackle Child Labour in Cocoa Growing Areas.”
He explained that through a strengthened continuous collaboration, stakeholders could support cocoa growing communities to meet the needs of more vulnerable children.
He recommended that a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) be strengthened in the areas of National Leadership, ownership and coordination by the government, with all collaborating parties subscribing to disciplines of information sharing, joint identification of priorities, and the adoption of common tools and metrics for tracking progress.
Another principle that needed joint force was to clearly define each other’s roles and responsibilities to enable all parties to work together, in a spirit of shared responsibility and called for transparency to translate shared responsibility into mutual accountability, and strive for set goals.
Recounting the importance of PPP, Mr Weatherill said there was a positive impact of the collaboration between communities, cooperatives, and local governments that made it possible for ICI to strengthen vigilance for child labour and invest in efforts to unearth the root causes of child labour, whether through improved access to education, women’s economic empowerment, or technical and vocational training for youth.
He said per a research ICI commissioned from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, lCI-assisted communities, compared to control communities, where 40 per cent more were able to mobilise community resources and seek local government support to protect children.
He urged stakeholders to prioritise many potential intervention areas to find a few sweet-spots where multi-stakeholder collaboration had the greatest potential to drive impact at scale.
At ICI, we particularly recognise the huge potential of the private and public sectors to work together under the framework of the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights, which pulls national systems and supply-chain systems into a mutually reinforcing synergy.
“But even within this framework, the primacy of national governments in protecting the rights of their citizens is paramount, and to this end, we are most fortunate that both the Governments of Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire have in place such strong and comprehensive National Action Plans for the elimination of child labour,” he said.
The Executive Director commended the Minister of Employment, Mr Ignatius Baffour-Awuah, for his vision and leadership in keeping child labour high on the agenda of the country.
“In speedreading the 269 pages of the Government’s 2020 Budget Statement, I found compelling reference to not less than eight national programmes that all carry direct relevance and potential for our fight against child labour in the cocoa sector, from the Free SHS programme, to the COCOBOD Scholarships programme, National Health Insurance Scheme, LEAP programme, and to the Ghana School Feeding Programme.
“And I was particularly interested to see both the Ghana Child Labour Monitoring System and the concept of Child Labour Free Zones singled out, not least because I personally believe that this offers fertile ground for public private collaboration.”
The Meeting was attended by more than 80 participants including; government representatives from Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, workers and farmer organisations, diplomats, and representatives from the cocoa and chocolate industry.
GNA
Read Full Story
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
YouTube
LinkedIn
RSS