Introduction | ICI CLMRS

Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) are a means of targeting prevention, mitigation and remediation assistance to children involved in or at risk of child labour, as well as to their families and communities.

The development of systems to monitor child labour has been underway since the 1990s, largely driven by the ILO’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC). With the goal of identifying and removing children from child labour, these systems are based around the key elements of “regularly repeated direct observations to identify child labourers and to determine risks to which they are exposed, referral of these children to services, verification that they have been removed and tracking them afterwards to ensure that their situation has improved.”⁹

Systems to monitor and remediate child labour have been put in place in multiple countries, in partnership with a range of actors at the local and national level, and in many different supply chains, including cocoa.

The 2011 UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights sets out the responsibility of businesses to put in place “a human rights due diligence process to identify, prevent, mitigate and account for how they address their impacts on human rights” and to “enable the remediation of any adverse human rights impacts they cause or to which they contribute”.¹⁰ These same messages emerge from the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, which emphasise the responsibility of businesses to carry out human rights due diligence, explaining that “addressing actual and potential adverse human rights impacts consists of taking adequate measures for their identification, prevention, where possible, and mitigation of potential human rights impacts, remediation of actual impacts, and accounting for how the adverse human rights impacts are addressed.”¹¹

In response to this guidance, increasing numbers of businesses have recognised child labour as a salient human rights risk and adopted Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems as a way of conducting their due diligence in response to this risk.

This trend is being accelerated by a raft of legislation that has been adopted or is currently being drafted in various countries which will make human rights due diligence mandatory for businesses operating global supply chains.¹² Such legislation is expected to increasingly oblige businesses to assess human rights risks across their supply chains, to take action to prevent, mitigate and address these risks, to ensure that victims of human rights abuses receive remediation and to report on their efforts and outcomes.

Increasing numbers of businesses in the cocoa sector have recognised child labour as a salient human rights risk, and adopted Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems as a way of conducting their due diligence in response to this risk.

For this review, we adopt an operational definition of a Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System which, in line with the language of the UN Guiding Principles, includes explicit mention of both monitoring and remedy, and is based on the CLMRS Benchmarking study.¹³ This definition requires that a CLMRS be able to implement the following core activities:

Raise awareness about child labour and the resulting harm amongst farmers, children and the wider community.
Identify children in child labour through active, regular and repeated monitoring, using standardised data collection tools.
Provide support (prevention and remediation) to children in child labour or at risk of child labour, their families and communities, as well as document the support provided.
Follow-up with children identified in child labour and continue to monitor their status on a regular basis until they have stopped engaging in child labour and have satisfactory alternatives.¹⁴

All of the core activities under a CLMRS should be implemented wherever possible in partnership with structures already in place to address child labour, notably governmental structures, and should seek to strengthen capacities of local stakeholders, as well as of existing child protection systems. The outcomes of these activities should be verified by independent third parties.

In the smallholder agricultural sector, and in the cocoa sector in particular, Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems (CLMRS) have gained increasing prominence, due in part to their promising results,¹⁵ but also to the fact that their establishment was made mandatory in the 2016 UTZ code of conduct and in the 2015 CocoaAction strategy from the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF). In 2020, the Rainforest Alliance published its Sustainable Agriculture Standard, which included the need to “assess and address” child labour, as well as other human rights risks, as a core element.¹⁶ In Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems are an explicit requirement for certified farmer groups.¹⁷

By 2020, Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems were estimated to cover around 25% of all cocoa-growing households in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.¹⁸ Multiple stakeholders, including governments, certifiers, companies and membership organisations are increasingly implementing, supporting or requiring CLMRS, and several stakeholders have made recent commitments to scale up CLMRS significantly across the cocoa supply chain.¹⁹

Objectives and scope of this review

In this study, we examine several Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems being implemented in the cocoa sector in West Africa. Building on the 2017 Effectiveness Review of Child Labour Monitoring Systems in the Smallholder Agricultural Sector of Sub-Saharan Africa,²⁰ also conducted as a collective multi-stakeholder exercise led by ICI, this second phase has been able to go into much greater detail, drawing from data now available from CLMRS that are being implemented by a growing number of stakeholders, including government, private sector and civil society actors. For this review, we have analysed information provided by 9 stakeholders who have implemented CLMRS, and granular data from 12 CLMRS projects, in order to understand how differences in the design, set-up, operation and management of such systems affect the way they function. We use these data insights not to recommend a single approach or to propose a ‘gold standard’ for CLMRS, but rather to highlight various modalities that have been chosen by stakeholders and to compare, where possible, their effectiveness in light of different criteria.

By 2020, Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems were estimated to cover around 25% of all cocoa- growing households in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.

The overall aim of the study is to identify ways of improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation Systems, to inform ongoing efforts to scale them up.

This research was guided by a Technical Working Group, consisting of CLMRS stakeholders from the cocoa and chocolate industry and international non-profit organisations, who worked collectively to determine the research questions, refine effectiveness criteria, contribute data from their systems for the analysis and participate in the review of the findings and recommendations. The catalogue of research questions, the data analysis plan and the analytical results have also been reviewed by an external academic expert.

This study aims to answer two main questions:

How do the institutional set-up and design of a CLMRS affect its ability to identify children in child labour?
Which modalities of a CLMRS work best to protect children from hazardous work and promote their education?

These questions are examined based on the quantitative data provided by CLMRS implementers. The effectiveness of a CLMRS must also be evaluated in terms of how sustainable it is, how successful it is at increasing capacity and ownership among local stakeholders, whether it helps to reinforce existing structures and whether it supports child labour prevention in the longer term. The data available for this report and the experience gathered to date does not allow us to adequately answer these questions. They remain priority topics to be investigated as more data becomes available and qualitative assessments and longer-term observations allow for solid conclusions.

Structure of the report

This report is organised as follows: first, we briefly take stock of the progress made since phase 1 of the ICI CLMRS effectiveness review. Second, we present the data and methodology used for analysis. This is followed by the core analysis section, which is divided into two parts: Part A addresses the question of how effective different CLMRS are at identifying cases of child labour, drawing on child-level data available from monitoring visits. Part B addresses the question of how effective CLMRS are at improving children’s situations, in terms of their exposure to hazardous work and their participation in school, drawing on available data from follow-up visits to children after they received support. Appendix A provides detailed overviews of the different systems currently in place in the cocoa sector, in order to understand differences in their set-up and coverage. An online appendix provides additional detail on the data and methods used, as well as supplementary analytical results.

Progress since the first CLMRS Effectiveness Review

The report from phase 1 of ICI’s CLMRS Effectiveness Review, Effectiveness Review of CLMRS in the Smallholder Agricultural Sector of Sub-Saharan Africa, 2017, features recommendations to implementers of CLMRS, general recommendations for the cocoa sector and a set of questions to be answered during the second phase of the effectiveness review. Table 1 recalls each of these recommendations, takes stock of what has been partly or fully accomplished and notes where further progress is needed.

Project-specific recommendations to implementers

Table 1: Summary of progress since the 2017 Effectiveness Review of CLMRS in the Smallholder Agricultural Sector of Sub-Saharan Africa.

Recommendation in phase 1 report	Accomplished / progress made?
When implementing a CLMS, define an indicative list of key inputs (participation in a training and a field exercise, etc.) and outcomes (key competences, skills and information acquired) as minimum training requirements for monitors and ensure that these are assessed before monitors begin their tasks.	✔Recommendation followed by most CLMRS implementers.
Define unified terms of reference with control points for third-party verifications of CLMS.	✔Recommendation followed by some CLMRS implementers. ► More transparency needed on third-party verification by several CLMRS implementers.
Simplify existing CLMS procedures / data collection processes and integrate them into existing governance/management structures to increase cost-efficiency.	? Data sharing from several systems for this review has shown that there is a partial overlap in data structures, but major transformations are still needed before the data can be consolidated. ► Efforts are ongoing to define common monitoring frameworks including reporting on output and outcomes of CLMRS (see ICI CLMRS benchmarking study).²¹

Recommendation in phase 1 report

Accomplished / progress made?

When implementing a CLMS, define an indicative list of key inputs (participation in a training and a field exercise, etc.) and outcomes (key competences, skills and information acquired) as minimum training requirements for monitors and ensure that these are assessed before monitors begin their tasks.

✔Recommendation followed by most CLMRS implementers.

Define unified terms of reference with control points for third-party verifications of CLMS.

✔Recommendation followed by some CLMRS implementers.

► More transparency needed on third-party verification by several CLMRS implementers.

Simplify existing CLMS procedures / data collection processes and integrate them into existing governance/management structures to increase cost-efficiency.

? Data sharing from several systems for this review has shown that there is a partial overlap in data structures, but major transformations are still needed before the data can be consolidated.

► Efforts are ongoing to define common monitoring frameworks including reporting on output and outcomes of CLMRS (see ICI CLMRS benchmarking study).²¹

Recommendations for Effectiveness Review Phase 2

Recommendation in phase 1 report	Accomplished / progress made?
Using targeted Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices surveys (ex-post assessments), assess the respective impact of each type of awareness-raising intervention, for each target group and, where possible, establish the cost of each intervention to be able to determine their cost-effectiveness.	? Data available for the second phase of the CLMRS ER does not allow us to assess the impact of specific awareness-raising interventions or to determine cost effectiveness. ► Dedicated separate study planned for a comparative assessment of different awareness-raising approaches.
Pool information from all CocoaAction companies and other actors operating CLMSs on the beneficiaries-per-monitor ratio, their level of compensation, their means of transport (bike, motorbike, etc.) and the average distance to the farmers.	✔Partly accomplished. Several companies have shared data on various elements of their systems, including granular data from monitoring visits. ► Elements recommended for comparative analysis in phase 1 were deprioritised, in favour of other more relevant aspects, such as payment of monitoring agents, context of monitoring visits and system sustainability.
Compare identification/remediation rates.	✔Accomplished, see Analysis Part A / Analysis Part B.
Compare existing data collection tools and define a list of common questions and indicators used across different systems.	✔Accomplished, see Appendix A.
Disaggregate results (e.g. the number of children once identified in child labour, but that no longer are) according to the type of remediation support received and, wherever possible, match it with information on the household and community environment, in order to identify the strategies that are most efficient in reducing child labour.	✔Accomplished, see Analysis Part B.
Encourage companies to isolate the unit cost of different key components of their CLMS (at least of each remediation intervention – especially those at household and individual level) to be able to determine and compare their cost-effectiveness.	? Data available for the second phase of the effectiveness review do not allow us to assess and compare the cost-effectiveness of different components. ► If CLMRS implementers are ready to share selected elements of system cost in a coherent format, this would enable insights into cost‐effectiveness.

General recommendations for the cocoa sector

Recommendation in phase 1 report	Accomplished / progress made?
Agree on a unified procedure to identify cases of child labour based on existing national legislations and international conventions.	✔All CLMRS reviewed for this report apply national legislation and international conventions to identify cases of child labour. However different data collection tools and procedures are applied under different systems. ► More progress needed towards aligned procedures and methods for child labour identification and measurement.
Develop/adapt existing interview guides for monitors that encompass good practices in child labour identification (age verification techniques, etc.) and include a strong child-safeguarding component as part of the mandatory training of all monitors.	✔Partly accomplished. Exchange of good practice within the sector on interview techniques, child-safeguarding, etc, is occurring. ► ICI is currently developing a CLMRS manual, which will cover training guidelines for monitoring agents, protocols for monitoring and remediation, child safeguarding guidelines, etc.
Gather legal requirements for the operation of a CLMS in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire in a short guide to be shared with the whole cocoa sector.	✔No legal requirements relating to CLMS per se in place; legislative frameworks related to child labour for Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are summarised in documents available from ICI. ► Progress to be monitored.
Define a unified procedure for declaring that a previously identified/assisted child is no longer in child labour.	✔This report suggests a possible benchmark; no general alignment within the sector achieved yet.
Agree on a definition of what “covered” or “monitored by the system” means practically, to allow for better comparison between systems.	✔Common definitions of "covered" and "monitored" have been agreed in the context of the CLMRS Benchmarking Study.
Review and refine the existing set of effectiveness criteria that is adapted to different CLMS and/or encourage companies in the sector to put in place data collection systems capable of tracking them so that comparison between the effectiveness of different systems becomes possible.	✔Progress made during discussions among the Technical Working Group overseeing the ER phase 2.
Define roles and the division of labour between national and private CLMS.	✔Some implementers have discussed and agreed upon roles and responsibilities with producing country governments. Governments are increasingly playing their coordination role, gathering data from all systems.