Good Praxis

This tool has been developed as part of the 3 year UK Aid funded Partnership Against Child Exploitation programme, addressing the worst forms of child labour in three fragile African contexts of Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

The tool combines an innovative, bottom-up supply chain mapping approach with labour market & value chain analyses of tantalum mining in DRC and sesame farming in Ethiopia. This new approach helps reveal where child labour can often operate invisibly and undetected in the supply chains of our food and electronics, which traditional top-down supply chain mapping methodologies struggle to identify.

Typically, the supply chain is understood end-to-end, starting with the final product and looking top-down, with the origin or raw commodity level at the furthest point from it. However, child labour is primarily a geographic challenge. So, to meaningfully understand and address it, a new model is required to better identify the key stages of the supply chain, and particularly to see origin agricultural communities and mines as a critical part of the industry they enable.

This can help identify opportunities for companies, investors and others to work together across industries to see better and faster impact where child labour exists. We need to quickly move from a focus on finding and assessing the risks – to identifying effective interventions and minimising unintended consequences.

Systemic and systematic approaches are required at the local level, while also identifying dynamics that impact children both positively and negatively across the whole fabric of the local community and economy.

The site draws together research that focuses on identifying pathways to remove children from the worst forms of child labour and to prevent it re-occurring - with recommendations for safe and decent alternatives.

It is intended to help give organisations of all shapes, sizes and stages of the supply chain an easy to access way of engaging with a complex issue, and is primarily aimed at engaging investors, the private sector and other stakeholders to identify where the WFCL can be present in products and supply chains, learn about the root causes at community, national and global levels, and to provide recommendations on how committed and effective multi-stakeholder partnerships can drive holistic and transformative change in the communities where raw materials are sourced.

The project has been built in collaboration with Noble Studio.