A young boy works through the day raking cocoa beans. Photo courtesy of International Labor Rights Fund

Madi Sawadogo (his name has been changed for his own protection) is one such youth. He is a Burkina Fasan who was interviewed last February by Save the Children Canada. At the age of 14, he was approached by a man and promised work on a cocoa farm in neighboring Ivory Coast. He was sold to a farmer named Alpha Siddiki and told he would earn the equivalent of $173 Cdn a year.

But work on a cocoa farm is dangerous, requiring the use of machetes to open the cocoa pods and hooked blades to pluck them from the trees. Siddiki also abused him and fed him very little, according to the caseworker at Save the Children Canada.

After just 18 months he fled the farm, but Siddiki had only paid him for 12 months work.  He bought a bicycle for about $36 Cdn. But, by the time he crossed the border his money had run out. He was later found begging on the streets of Burkina Faso.

His story is not unusual. Children from Burkina Faso often make the journey to the Ivory Coast to buy bicycles, shoes and clothes, explains Anita Sheth, senior analyst for advocacy, policy and research at Save the Children Canada.

“Of course, none of them we interviewed were able to do any or all of these things, as they were not paid, or paid so little after two to three years that they used the money to buy a bus ticket to come home.”

They often leave to find work after hearing rumors of other children who have travelled the dirt roads from Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast, worked on the cocoa farms and returned with money and new bicycles. In a country like Burkina Faso, where 90 per cent of inhabitants survive on subsistence farming and entire livelihoods are simply wiped out by drought, the promise of wealth, however modest, is enticing.

“The situation can be linked to prostitution where young prostitutes are described a much better environment then they find themselves in,” explains Richard Seguin of Amnesty International. “Once they are there its easy for them to become prisoners of that environment.”

“Making Ends Meet”

The Ivory Coast produces just under half of the world’s cocoa, according to the Child Labor Monitoring System. There are 600,000 cocoa farmers in the country and their work generates revenue amounting to 10 per cent of its gross domestic product. The farmers, however, see very little of this money. Most cocoa farmers barely make enough income to cover their costs, explains Dario Lezzoni, executive director of Equita at Oxfam. To this, Seguin adds, “there is a tremendous amount of roadblocks and the farmer has to pay all the middlemen. Between the picker to the farmer to the exporting agent, the mark-ups are tremendous and the picker and the farmer make very little.”

After paying a hefty sum for child laborers like Madi Sawadogo, farmers have little left over to properly provide for the children in their care. There are also few social services available in the rural areas where cocoa is grown.

“As cocoa is often grown in remote rural areas, communities face numerous challenges, such as the lack of education provision, or difficult access to services such as quality health centers,” says Muriel Guige communication coordinator for the International Cocoa Initiative.

“A Hard Days Work”

Children often start working on these farms as young as 11 or 12 years old and are often the youngest or second youngest child in their family, says Sheth. Many leave without even telling their parents and in some cases the parents have spent years searching for their children. According to the International Cocoa Initiative, just over 625,000 children working on cocoa farms in Cote D’Ivoire and 35 per cent are between the ages of 5 and 14 years old.

The children do some of the most labour-intensive work on the farms, including clearing the land, weeding, spraying pesticides, cutting cocoa pods from the trees and drying, bagging and carrying the seeds This is dangerous work that can result in severed limbs or open wounds from machete cuts, poisoning from pesticide use and many other work-related injuries.

The lack of available health services in these communities, means children are often not even given adequate medical care for their injuries. This was a problem for Madi Sawadogo, who cut himself several times with a machete, according to the caseworker, but never received adequate medical attention.

It is important to note, however, that children often live on family cocoa farms and their presence on these farms is not necessarily indicative of a problem.

“Most countries, including Canada, use child labour. The difference in the Ivory Coast is the conditions under which they work,” explains Sheth. “Often times, children work during the school year … most of them have never been to school and most of this type of labour is trafficked labor which is clandestine and hidden” 

It is migrant youth from Burkina Faso and Mali who live in the worst conditions on these farms she says. The youth, who are isolated on the farms, have no access to schooling and are unable to leave the plantations or even contact their families. 

Groups like Save the Children Canada try to intercept children at border cities, but it is impossible to say how many youth have attempted to migrate from Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast even within the last year, says Sheth. Children are able to walk freely from country to country and there are no records kept of all the children crossing border areas. However, estimates have indicated that at least 500 children a year could enter the Ivory Coast from various border towns.

Because it is so difficult to intercept the children, NGOs seem to focus their efforts on prevention. Save the Children Canada, for example, has developed several projects geared towards raising awareness on the risks of migration. One such project, explains Sheth, is the development of schools in the border areas between the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. These schools have curriculum geared towards working children and aim at educating youth in alternative forms of income generation.