Sharing our expertise on the cocoa sector at Amsterdam Cocoa Week
KIT is delighted to partner with and co-sponsor Amsterdam Cocoa Week! We will kick off the week-long event by hosting an eye-opening session titled, ‘Unpacking the Relationship Between Income and Child Labour in Cocoa’.
Over the years, KIT has been actively involved in testing and evaluating strategies to increase household income for farmers towards earning a living income and eliminate child labour in the cocoa sector. We’re very keen to share this experience and expertise, along with our partners, at Amsterdam Cocoa Week (ACW).
These discussions are all the more critical and timely given the significant policy developments implemented in the European Union (EU) in 2023.
Talking about interventions for impact
We will host one session and participate in two other sessions, hosted by our partners. Our focus will be on child labour and cash transfers.
While income improvement and reducing child labour have become priorities across the sector, there is too little evidence on how these can be addressed. Interventions often lack rigorous evidence on their impact and differences in used indicators and methodologies limit the comparability of existing evidence. Moreover, the link between income and child labour are currently not well understood. For example, a 2023 KIT study demonstrated that households earning the equivalent of the living income benchmark had the highest prevalence of hazardous child labour.
These results suggest that interventions aimed at increasing cocoa-producing households’ income through sustainable intensification of cocoa production or income diversification may, in fact, unintentionally increase the risk of child labour by increasing household labour demand.
So, we’ve joined several companies, partners in the cocoa sector, and implementing agencies as a knowledge partner to pilot test interventions such as labour-saving technologies, village savings, and cash transfers, and evaluate their impact on households’ incomes, child labour prevalence, and children’s wellbeing.
A contribution to the future of cocoa
We will share our findings from these interventions, our work on living income and child labour, and our research agenda during the session on 5 February 2024.
For details about the other sessions we’ll be participating in please see below.
This event will offer stakeholders in the cocoa sector the opportunity to connect and inspire one another and shape their contribution to the future of cocoa. If you’d like to be a part of this discussion you can register for the week-long event here.
Sessions at ACW
Unpacking the relationship between income and child labour in the cocoa sector
Date: 5 February 2024
Time: 0900-1030
About the session: Our experts will present our work on child labour in the cocoa sector and our research agenda. In doing so, we translate evidence-based knowledge into application strategies and ways forward. To better protect children, we need to further understand the relationship between household income and child labour, and explore how income related approaches can complement other existing systems to tackle child labour and define ways to safeguard against unintended risks. In this session, key learnings are presented and are translated into practices, and discussed for ways forward.
This session will be moderated by KIT’s new Managing Director for the Knowledge Unit, Mayada El-Zoghbi, and is in partnership with International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), Tony’s Open Chain and ECOM.
Launch Cocoa Household Income Study
Date: 5 February 2024
Time: 1100 – 1200
About the session: Our experts Selma van der Haar and Oumou Diallo will present the standard Cocoa Household Income Study (CHIS) methodology that they have developed in collaboration with Wageningen University, World Cocoa Foundation, GIZ and SWISSCO. The methodology is currently being vetted by the cocoa industry and will serve as a standard for sector wide methodological alignment on households’ living income gap and impact measurement (indicators, tools and approaches).
Trilogy on pricing II – simply cash?
Date: 8 February 2024
Time: 10:30 –12:00
About the session: KIT expert, Rik Habraken will join a panel on cash transfers and living income as part of CHOCOA, part of ACW, that will be held on 8 and 9 February. Rik will share his views on cash transfers to cocoa farming households and share findings from recent projects on how to make cash transfer programs more effective. He will also discuss the potential of cash transfers with regards to price increases, and share some insights in the effects of cash transfer programmes in Cote d’Ivoire.
