Dear John,

The incidence of child labor has declined significantly over the past fifteen years, since ILRF produced Stolen Childhoods, the first feature-length film on the topic.

Yet the ILO’s latest global estimates of child labor show that the decrease in child labor has slowed notably and has actually increased in Sub Saharan Africa.

Please make a generous year-end gift today and sustain our advocacy to end child and forced labor around the world.

This past year, ILRF’s campaign to end child and forced child labor in West Africa’s cocoa sector got a major boost. A Washington Post series combined with advocacy from Senators Brown and Wyden to draw attention to the persistence of these egregious rights violations and the lack of effective interventions by the very lucrative chocolate industry. Next year, the industry will have to reckon with the goals they set in 2010 to reduce the worst forms of child labor 70% by 2020 and trends have not been promising. Please help us to redouble our pressure for change!

ILRF has advocated for years that in order to end child labor, including forced child labor, both government and industry actors need to not only build more schools and train more teachers, but also address the abject poverty of cocoa-farming families. We called for programs to improve farmer incomes, rebuild roads to help farmers access the market, and low interest access to credit so they aren’t forced to sell their cocoa to the first broker (or pisteur) who comes through their village and offers to pay them.

This year, the conversation on farmer incomes finally gained traction. The governments of Ghana and Ivory Coast, the two countries which together produce 60% of the world’s cocoa, set a price floor. Although we are heartened by this positive, seismic shift in approach, we remain concerned that support from the industry is only partial and there are questions still about how much of the new price per kilo goes to farmers directly. Please help us continue pushing the chocolate industry to ensure these reforms benefit farmers and advance the goal of ending child and forced child labor in West Africa’s cocoa sector.

This week we learned the World Bank is now proposing to lend hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the productivity of Ivory Coast’s cocoa economy. We need to make sure that loan is not just helping to subsidize what the cocoa industry itself should pay for: a fair price for cocoa farmers!

Would you please make a year-end gift to support ILRF’s campaigns to end forced and child labor globally?

In solidarity,

Judy Gearhart
Executive Director

Please consider joining ILRF as a monthly donor to help sustain our ability to stand with labor rights defenders around the world.

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