The U.S. Department of Labor has granted USD 2,000,000 to support a project on building the capacity of the government and businesses to expand and better coordinate ongoing labour trafficking enforcement efforts in Ghana, contributing to the U.S. Government’s efforts to advance respect for human rights among businesses.

Despite a relatively strong national anti-trafficking legal framework, forced labour and labour trafficking have been documented in a number of key economic sectors in Ghana. Government anti-trafficking efforts are limited by a lack of systematic data collection, monitoring and analysis. Meanwhile, private sector efforts to monitor labour practices have for the most part focused narrowly on the prevention of child labour in the country’s high-profile cocoa industry. And both companies and governments and others face the persistent challenge of identifying the point at which grueling or poorly paid work becomes involuntary – and thus violates international standards and national laws.

The project will help law enforcement, private sector due diligence monitors, social service and civil society organizations and workers themselves to prevent, detect and eliminate forced labour and labour trafficking in supply chains. By adopting an indicator-based framework developed by the ILO, stakeholders will share a common vocabulary and set of indicators to coordinate anti-labour-trafficking efforts.

The project will leverage the programming and monitoring infrastructure already in place to combat child labour in cocoa and expand its reach to other sectors known to be at risk of using forced labour in Ghana.

Project partners will also collect up-to-date qualitative and quantitative data on indicators of forced labour currently present in selected sectors. This data will be fed into piloting a streamlined approach to forced labour monitoring. By integrating this approach into existing efforts, encouraging coordinated efforts among stakeholders and providing labour inspectors with the tools and training they need, the project will promote a scalable, resource-effective model for monitoring and enforcement.

Project Duration: December 2017 – December 2021
Grantee: Verité
Implementing Partners: International Cocoa Initiative, NORC

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More information on the project can be found here.