SIKASSO (ILO News) - Over two days in Sikasso, stakeholders from the ILO ACCEL and ILO CLEAR Cotton projects in Mali, engaged on innovative and engaging methodologies to eliminate child labour in agricultural value chains: gold mining and cotton production.
Partners shared the importance of a diverse set of initiatives to combat child labour. For example: skills development, awareness raising, social finance and the use of technology for the improvement of agriculture. The discussion highlighted partners' interest in understanding the links between independent project interventions and impact on actual beneficiaries. For example, it has been extensively discussed how social finance interventions can support women's empowerment.
The partners presented various interventions, including:
Alphalog works to introduce children of legal working age (15-17 years) to professional training. They also support mothers of children to help them organize cooperatives, train them in entrepreneurial skills and bring them closer to microfinance institutions.
The CRK accompanies children aged 15 to 17 who are or are not at school. They help them develop their skills and find a job, thanks to vocational guidance.
VIAMO pilots mobile training on child labour. This training aims to improve the knowledge of project implementers on child labour so that they are able to raise community awareness of this issue, identify risky situations, detect cases of children in child labour and refer them with the aim of reducing child labour in their area of intervention.
RMCR provides sustainable financial services to ACCEL beneficiaries.
CAEB identifies beneficiaries and their community organization, supporting and complementing the work of RMCR and Viamo.
The Chamber of Mines organizes the artisanal mining sector and supports the implementation of the roadmap on the elimination of child labour in gold mining.
In the end, partners agreed that capacity building of local authorities is necessary for sustainability “they cannot act on issues they do not fully understand”. Similarly, partners stressed the importance of scaling up interventions that include women's empowerment “women's empowerment is children's empowerment. » The partners also discussed implementation gaps, among the most important:
Development and implementation of a strong legal framework, which could explicitly prohibit the engagement of children in labour and the clear establishment of the elimination of child labour in the regulations of cooperatives in the target value chains.
Strengthen communications at the local level through videos, poetry, theatre, or community discussions.
Empowering women through leadership skills and giving them the right to own land.
How to engage children against child labour and in the implementation of projects that directly concern them.
The event will be followed by a regional knowledge sharing event at ACCEL level, during which solutions to implementation gaps will be proposed and an implementation plan will be developed.
