$12M in grants to benefit vulnerable children and youth in cocoa growing areas of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been championing efforts to reduce child labor in West African cocoa production, providing vulnerable children in cocoa-growing areas with better access to education and vocational training, and their families with support so they can better provide for themselves and meet their basic needs without relying on child labor.

Today, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs is announcing $12 million in funding for three new grants to advance its efforts on this issue. In Côte d'Ivoire, the $4.5 million Project to Reduce Child Labor in Côte d'Ivoire's Cocoa Growing Areas will work to ensure that children can safely get a quality education. While in Ghana, the $4.5 million Project to Mobilize Community Action and Promote Opportunities for Youth in Ghana's Cocoa Growing Communities will provide opportunities for at-risk youth to develop marketable skills and secure safe and age-appropriate work. In both countries, a portion of the project funds will support efforts to empower local communities to act on their own initiative and develop action plans to address child labor in cocoa-growing areas.

In addition, a $3 million project, Assessing Progress in Reducing Child Labor in Cocoa Growing Areas of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, will support comprehensive measurement of the effect of these and other efforts being made to combat child labor in these regions by governments, civil society and the international cocoa and chocolate industry. The project will also include a child labor survey and a map of geographic areas and communities that have been the recipient of interventions to address child labor in cocoa.

The announcement of these new grants comes as a Tulane University study funded by ILAB is released, indicating that more than 2 million children are still engaged in hazardous work in the cocoa sectors of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana.

"While progress has been made, we know that much work remains to be done," said Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez. "There is an urgent need to find new ways for accelerating, scaling up and sustaining progress on child labor in cocoa. Time is not on our side. Childhoods — and with them the opportunity for quality education and a better life — fade with every passing season."

These new projects will support priorities of the governments of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana who, along with the U.S. Department of Labor and the international chocolate and cocoa industry, were signatories to the Declaration of Joint Action to Support Implementation of the Harkin-Engel Protocol. That Declaration and its Framework of Action set a goal of reducing the worst forms of child labor in the cocoa sectors of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana by 70 percent by the year 2020.

Applications must be submitted with sufficient time to meet the deadline electronically via http://www.grants.gov or by hard copy to:

U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration Office of Grants Management Attention: Elizabeth Whittington, Grant Officer Reference Number:

• FOA-ILAB-15-07 for the cocoa survey
• FOA-ILAB-15-08 for Côte d'Ivoire
• FOA-ILAB-15-09 for Ghana

200 Constitution Avenue, NW, Room N4673 Washington, D.C. 20210

The funding opportunity announcements (FOA-ILAB-15-07 or FOA-ILAB-15-08 or FOA-ILAB-15-09) are available online at http://www.dol.gov/ILAB/grants/ and http://www.grants.gov.

ILAB leads the U.S. government's efforts to ensure that workers around the world are treated fairly and are able to share in the benefits of the global economy. To these ends, ILAB has provided funding for 292 projects in over 90 countries to combat the worst forms of child labor by providing assistance to vulnerable children and their families. More information is available at www.dol.gov/ilab/.