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Recent News

The International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) reports on achievements driven by the Harkin-Engel Protocol and describes next steps laid out by industry. The Protocol marked the first time that an entire industry stepped forward and worked with governments, civil society and other stakeholders to address the worst forms of child labor and forced adult labor in its supply chain.
Read the entire article here.


ICVB Vision Statement

Verification is an essential step in assessing labor conditions in cocoa-growing communities in West Africa. The ICVB holds the strong conviction that accurate data will help guide strategic planning and programming to effectively address potential areas of concern, including child and forced adult labor. Properly verified data will ensure that future remediation activities are more strategic, cost-effective, targeted and synergistic. Our true stakeholders are the cocoa farmers and children and we measure our success or failure by how well their lives improve, in part, due to our work. Accurate data matters.
About Us
The International Cocoa Verification Board (ICVB) is a non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization that was convened by Verité in December, 2007, to ensure that certification efforts to evaluate the occurrence of child or forced adult labor in cocoa producing areas in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are independently verified. Verifying the soundness of the data collection methodologies and the accuracy of survey the findings helps to ensure that remediation efforts are more strategically focused on the areas and issues that are in greatest need of remediation. Reliable data informs meaningful, enduring change for cocoa producing communities in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. All stakeholders, from governments to civil society actors, will be able to use the results of this verification effort to strengthen their work going forward.

ICVB Core Goals:
  • Strengthened Remediation: By more accurately assessing conditions on the ground and improving data collection techniques, verification will ensure that future remediation efforts are more effective, better targeted and more strategically implemented.
  • Improved National Surveys: By recommending methodological improvements to the Governments of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire regarding their National Surveys, the verifiers will make recommendations that will help ensure that scale-up surveys are increasingly accurate and that research capacity at the national level is enhanced
  • Knowledge Transfer: As verification will likely take place using multi-national teams, it is expected that the NGOs and academics involved in verification will find mutual benefit from each other’s varied strengths and perspectives and that efforts should be made to strengthen the capacity of verification partners in these countries
  • Strengthen Ongoing Multi-Stakeholder Engagement: By coming together to create a verification regime, this effort will provide an ongoing mechanism (that was heretofore non-existent) for all stakeholders to constructively engage in creating new mechanisms for improving the lives of West African cocoa farmers and children.