Ghana will not miss the 2011 deadline for the elimination of worst forms of child labour in cocoa, according to the National Programme for the Elimination of Worst Forms of Child Labour in Cocoa (NPECLC).

This is because the nation is making steady progress in the quest to discourage the use of child labour in cocoa, Mrs. Rita Owusu-Amankwah, National Programme Manager of the NPECLC, has told the Public Agenda.

She spoke to this paper during the "6th Partners' Meeting to discuss Coordination of Worst Forms of Child Labour Interventions in Ghana's Cocoa Sector." The meeting was also in response to some recommendations made at the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) conference organised in the United Kingdom earlier in the year.

Of immediate interest were some recommendations made at the ICI conference as well as some emerging issues, especially the need to investigate how child trafficking was related to the cocoa sector.

Among others, the ICI conference recommended the following urgent actions to be tackled at the government level: "Disseminate widely National Action Plans and ensure a regular national coordination mechanism that allows all partners to contribute to these plans, share information and build on lessons learned"; and "Extend the regular cocoa sector studies .to drive effective policy, remediation and corrective action."

Mrs. Owusu- Amankwah noted that the NPECLC was already doing all of these, as well as many other things. She said the programme had already completed two studies: a pilot study that covered six cocoa-growing districts and a scale-up study which covered 15 cocoa-growing districts.

And, based on the findings, the programme was doing remediation activities in various cocoa districts. The remediation activities included support to over 1,300 children in cocoa-growing communities in 14 districts to access formal education and employable skills. Besides, "Child Rights Clubs" have been formed in about 15 communities. Elsewhere, 13 District Child Protection Committees (DCPC) and 110 Community Child Protection Committees in the cocoa-growing districts have been formed.

Presently, there are 61 cocoa-growing districts. But the programme works in only 11 and hopes to add 36 more by the end of 2008. The National Programme Officer says the NPECLC should be working in all the 61 districts by the end of 2009; and this should boost efforts to get rid of Worst Forms of Child Labour (WFCL) in cocoa.

WFCL embraces practices like slavery, compulsory labour, bondage, prostitution, and pornography. Also included in WFCL is work that is hazardous or harmful or interferes with a child's education. The NPECLC contends that opinions differ on what actually constitutes hazardous work. In response, the programme has developed a Hazardous Child Labour Activity Framework (HAF). The HAF categorises activities such as spraying insecticides; applying fungicides and herbicides; working on farm for too long; peg cutting; lining and pegging; felling and chopping trees; and using cutlass for weeding as hazardous.

In the scale-up cocoa survey conducted in 2007/2008 cocoa season, the NPECLC reported that about 46% of children had participated in at least one hazardous cocoa activity during the previous cocoa farming season in relation to the HAF. This study, according to the researchers, covered areas that together produced 60% of the total cocoa output in Ghana in the 2004/2005 cocoa season, and included all the six cocoa-growing regions in Ghana.

In September 2008, two journalists who toured some cocoa-growing communities in the Brong Ahafo and Western Regions majority (about 60%) of children in these communities, aged between 10 and 15 years, undertook one or more activity classified as hazardous under the HAF. However, the team found no cases of forced child labour or bondage, which has been one of the issues raised by the western media.

In fact, the NPECLC was created in 2006 in response to negative international press that Ghana had received in respect to the existence of WFCL within the cocoa production chain. The goal of the programme is to eliminate WFCL in the cocoa sector by 2011 and contribute towards the elimination of WFCL in all sectors by 2015.

One of the key things the NPECLC has done is the development of the Community-Based Child Labour Monitoring (CCLM) system which carries out community surveillance, data collection, analysis, reporting and remediation. Another is the institution of the "Partners' Forum" at which organizations implementing projects and programmes to eliminate WFCL in cocoa discuss activities and plans, and share best practices.

At the partners' meeting, there were suggestions that remediation activities should not only take place at the community level; but remediation should reflect in policy approaches at the national level.