Child Labour study:
Combatting child labour in coffee production

Moyee boldly goes where no one wants to go

“I have been very strongly advocating that poverty must not be used as an excuse to continue child labor and exploitation of children. Child labor perpetuates poverty. Child labor creates poverty. If the children are deprived from education, then they are bound to remain poor for the whole of their life. So it’s a triangular relationship between child labor, poverty and illiteracy.”

Kailash Satyarthi

Nobel Peace Laureate

Those words where spoken by Kailash Satyarthi hours after learning he had been awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize for his longtime advocacy for children’s rights and education.

As you know by now we did not start Moyee to just sell coffee but to create a business model that goes beyond less bad and even beyond no bad. We think that business models of the future should contribute to cleaning up the mess caused in the last 50 years. Moyee works on a NET POSITIVE model. A model that puts more back into society, the environment and the global economy than it takes out.

Next to roasting at origin, to create jobs and increase income potential, we started out to double the best farmer premium we could find and pay 20% on top of the market price.

Cool dudes, not?

Well soon after we found out that this is not enough to get farmers to a living income.

Unlike many 3^rd wave Roasters, sourcing their coffee via direct coffee traders, our farmers are not the picture perfect farmers that can deliver the high quality coffee required in specialty markets easily. We go there where no one wants to go freely, there where the problems are the biggest but.. where we also can have the biggest impact.

We focus on Farmers that live below extreme poverty levels with a huge gap to a living income that cannot be solved via “ paying the farmer a fair price” or ‘give them access to credit” or “help with agricultural practices” overalone.

What the heck is a fair price anyhow and how can you pay off credit if you cant even pay for food or schooling?

Read our blog on how we designed our holistic living income roadmap and pivoted from a 20% premium to a living income reference price.

so why is moyee bothered with childlabor

To be honest for a long time we thought child labour was not such a big issue. We have seen children work on the farms but we also saw all these kids go to school. Maybe it also had to do with our focus. With inequality and poverty being the root cause of many problems our focus was on getting the farmers we work with to earn a living income. We can only do so much, right?

Then we received an invitation to the Taking Next Steps conference. During this meeting the organizers, the Dutch Ministry for Foreign Affairs, the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, in close collaboration with the International Labour Organisation and Global March Against Child Labour and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) liked to showcase new commitments of Pathfinder Countries of Alliance 8.7.

And when Moyee was asked to express its commitment of course we had to show our true colours and shared our commitment.

Did we put on too big a trouser (a typically Dutch saying)? Ethiopia’s country numbers look quite dramatic.

The future will tell what we can do but for sure we will start, like we always do, with some rigorous research. We don’t believe in story telling but storyproving and thus we need to get the baseline right before we can work on potential interventions and work on quantifiable and verifiable proof of impact.

And so we did. Together with the Dutch Government, Woord en Daad and Nascent we are conducting in depth research not only in Ethiopia but also in our Kenian supply chain.

What is child labour?

We work with the definitions by ILO3 and Unicef; “child labour is defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.”. In other words: any form of tasks or work that

deprives children of their childhood
interferes with their ability to attend school
is harmful to their development
is dangerous

How big is this problem now?

Can Moyee guarantee child labour free coffee? Unfortunately not, not yet that is. We know that in our sourcing areas, children help in coffee production. This is standard local practice based on old traditions, cultural norms, lack of opportunities and poverty.

We don’t know yet the exact childlabour numbers but we have estimates that range from 5% to 25% of children being engaged in child labour in our sourcing areas. But this is based on second hand information. This is exactly why we want to dive into this.

The time of looking away has ended. We will face the facts and share them with you.

Why is there child labour, how big is the problem, how can we work with the local communities to fight this? These are questions we are working with a consortium with FairChain foundation, FairChain agro & processing in Ethiopia and Kenya, Woord en Daad, Hope for Justice and Nascent RDO.

We will be honest to ourselves and you by sharing the results and proposed intervention plans in our next blog. #radicaltransparency

But without knowing the exact scale of our own problem we fully endorse policymaking in favour of making eradicating childlabour the norm!