Mali, 5 September 2022 - To raise awareness and improve the knowledge of various public and private service providers that are responsible for guiding agricultural producers in sectors with the prevalence of child labour and with the ultimate objective of reducing the risk of child labour in the agricultural sector and at the community level, the ILO ACCEL Africa project organized a pilot digital training on child labour to field officers in remote areas of Mali. The training was held entirely offline, through mobile phones.

The training, delivered between April and June 2022, targeted 100 field officers from 4 ACCEL partner organizations: RMCR (Microfinance Institution), CAEB (NGO), CMDT (Cotton Buyer), CPC (Cotton Cooperatives). Through the training, participants improve their knowledge of sensitization strategies at the community level, identify risky situations, detect cases of children in child labour, and referrals.

The topics covered by the training included:

1. The scale of the problem of child labour in the world, in Africa and in Mali
2. The legal framework for child labour in Mali
3. What is and is not child labour
4. What are the prohibited occupations for children in agriculture
5. The root causes of child labour
6. The negative consequences of child labour/deconstruction of myths
7. The strategy to adopt to eradicate child labour
8. The role of supervision agents in reducing child labour

The training showed positive participation results. Being the legal framework, what is and what is not child labour, the prohibited occupations for children in agriculture and the negative consequences of child labour/deconstruction of myths, the lessons showing the most significant participation.

The training showcased the effectiveness of offline interventions for training to reach beneficiaries in remote areas. This type of training:

• have, on average, a lower cost per learner and a great potential to scale up (reaching a higher amount of learners does not always add an extra cost for training),
• enable an automatized system to measure knowledge retention and impact,
• allows for quick identification of follow-up actions.

The training will be scaled up from October to December 2022 and aims to reach 500 new field officers, with possible replication in other Project beneficiaries - communities and countries.