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Mr Ignatius Baffour Awuah, the Minister of Employment and Labour Relations, has urged stakeholders in the fight against cocoa sector child labour to extend their campaigns to other agricultural sectors for holistic achievement.

He said the current trend would only take children from cocoa farms into another agriculture sector and “if that happens it means we have failed.”

He, therefore, called on the private sector to partner national governments in tackling the problem.
The Minister, at a two-day Stakeholder Workshop in Accra, urged the partners to extend the experiences gathered in coverage areas to other areas to support national efforts.

It was organised by the Ministry to: “Define Collaboration and Partnership Against Child Labour and Forced Labour in the Cocoa Sector in Ghana.”

Mr Baffour Awuah said poverty was the root cause of child labour in most farming communities and urged industries and all in the value chain to pay good prices to farmers for their produce to enable them to hire labour instead of resorting to child labour.

He said Civil Society Organisations had isolated stories which were over-highlighted at the neglect of national efforts and emphasised the need for such efforts to be national in nature.

“It is not only governments that have a responsibility, but industry and other partners also have responsibilities towards achieving the goal of eliminating child labour and if we are not able to achieve that, we all failed. It is about time we came out of the rhetoric into action,” Mr Awuah said.

The Sustainable Development Goals target 8(7) enjoins states to take immediate and effective measures to end all forms of child labour by 2025 on one hand, and the 70 per cent reduction in the worst forms of child labour agreement of the Harkin Engel Framework for Action, which ends in 2020.

Mr Baffour Awuah said the 2020 deadline for the Harkin Engel Framework for Action, undoubtedly, would lead to increased international attention on child labour in the cocoa sector.

“It is in view of this that the country developed and implemented National Partnership Agreement One (NPA1) and is currently implementing NPA2,” he added.