Trading and exploitation of children on the cacao plantations of Soubré, Ivory Coast
Many minors are traded from the neighbouring countries Burkina Faso and Mali to the Ivory Coast, where these children have to work on cacao plantations. A plantation owner can buy a child slave for only 20 Euros and have it work at his plantation for sixteen hours per day.
Many of those children are forced to hard work. They get lashed. The children sleep on the floor and get little to eat. Many of them die. The children are enticed with the idea that they will earn money on the plantation, but they do not receive anything. Running away often means to pay a very high price.
It is estimated that approximately 30-40% of the plantation owners is making use of child slavery, mainly in the central part of Ivory Coast. The owners sell their cacao in bulk quantity to the chocolate industry. This makes it very difficult to know precisely where the chocolate was produced and whether or not this was done by means of child slavery.
To reveal the truth, that is the objective of NGO la Providence. Who are the children that are being exploited on the plantations? Where do they come from, how did they get there? What to do as soon as the children are traced and identified? What can we effectively do to fight this phenomenon? All questions, which the people involved in the project ‘Lutte contre la traite transfrontalière des enfants dans la production du cacao ivoirien: Les planteurs CEDEAO de Soubré s'engagent' want to get answered.
Data systems will be installed, as well as security and means of control, all to fight the trading and exploitation of these minor workers.
ChildRight and la Providence cooperate closely.
