Xanthe Scharff: Women’s Empowerment and Child Labor in Cocoa: Ghana & Côte d’Ivoire
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/01/16
Dr. Xanthe Scharff is Managing Director for External Affairs and Editor-at-Large at The Freedom Fund, a collaborative fund that regrants resources to frontline, community-led organizations fighting modern slavery. A media executive, nonprofit founder, and journalist, she co-founded The Fuller Project in 2014 while reporting in Turkey and along the Syrian border. Her reporting and leadership have focused on trafficking, labour exploitation, and women’s rights. She founded Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa, supporting scholarships and mentoring in Malawi, and previously worked on global education policy at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education. She is in Washington, DC, and advises donors.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen asks how women’s empowerment can reduce child labour in cocoa communities in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, and how to avoid vague, ineffective solutions. Xanthe Scharff argues that durable progress starts with women’s economic security and with listening to frontline, community-led actors. She notes that Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire supply about 60% of global cocoa, while surveys estimate roughly 1.56 million children were engaged in child labour in those cocoa-growing areas in 2018/19. Scharff emphasizes living incomes, safer work, stronger schools, and survivor-informed, culturally grounded interventions supported by donors and industry. She highlights women’s organizing power for prevention.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In cocoa-growing communities in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, what are reliable pathways through which women’s empowerment reduces child labour? There is also an implied question: which approaches do not work?
Xanthe Scharff: I appreciate the focus on women’s involvement in addressing child labour. There are two ways to think about solutions. One is the lived experience and conditions of women workers themselves.
When women have access to decent, stable income and greater control over resources, households are more able to keep children in school and reduce reliance on children’s work. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are central to this discussion because together they produce over 60 percent—often described as nearly two-thirds—of the world’s cocoa.
Cocoa supply chains involve large multinational buyers and extensive smallholder production. In this context, child labour remains widespread. The most widely cited large-scale survey of cocoa-growing areas in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire (2018/19) estimated that about 1.56 million children were engaged in child labour in cocoa production—roughly 45 percent of children aged 5–17 in agricultural households in those areas. Children involved can be very young, including those as young as five.
Women’s economic position matters because women face structural constraints in cocoa communities, including barriers to land ownership and control over income. Widely cited research indicates women own roughly 25 percent of cocoa farms in Côte d’Ivoire, and when farming, household, and other unpaid tasks are combined, women’s working hours can exceed men’s by nearly 30 percent. These constraints limit women’s ability to invest in schooling, reduce time poverty, and strengthen household resilience.
A second dimension is women’s role as community organizers. Women are often well-positioned to identify risks, shape norms, and help design protections that keep children out of hazardous work and in school.
Globally, the most recent ILO estimates place child labour at nearly 138 million children worldwide, including about 54 million in hazardous work.
Jacobsen: That is an enormous number.
Scharff: It is. In cocoa-growing areas of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire alone, around 1.56 million children are estimated to be engaged in child labour in cocoa production. Addressing this requires listening to families and communities closest to children and designing interventions that make schooling feasible and safe.
Jacobsen: “Women’s empowerment” can become a vague concept, so it needs to be grounded in concrete objectives. In cocoa farming, what are effective, practical ways to empower women? For example, how can time burdens—such as women working nearly 30 percent more hours when all tasks are counted—be reduced? How can women gain access to better land or more secure land rights? And regarding investment, microloans are often discussed. Is there a threshold at which loans begin to produce measurable improvements in women’s livelihoods?
Scharff: I appreciate that you are starting with questions. There is a great deal written and discussed about these issues, but it helps to step back. I work at The Freedom Fund, which is a collaborative fund. We raise resources from a range of donors and regrant them to frontline, community-led organizations in countries where trafficking and child labour are present.
We do this because our experience consistently shows that the people closest to the problem are best positioned to identify workable solutions. Whether we are talking about Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, other African countries, or communities elsewhere in the world, local conditions vary widely. Experts who are distant from these realities are rarely as well-equipped as those working on the ground.
For us at The Freedom Fund, the answer is therefore consistent: listen to people closest to the problem, support them with funding and resources, enable them to organize and build movements, and learn directly from them what the priorities are. That local knowledge can then be strengthened with research and global connections.
When we talk about child labour and women, I can share examples from conversations with women in different contexts. These are not universal solutions, but they illustrate how locally grounded approaches work in practice.
I recently conducted a deep dive for a TIME article on child labour in the mining sector. While this is a different industry from cocoa, the underlying dynamics are similar. When women earn decent wages and have authority, they are better able to keep their children out of hazardous work and in school.
One example is Annie Mwangi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She purchased a mine after witnessing women being systematically underpaid and harassed. She then established a program to help other women access financing to purchase mines themselves, creating safer working conditions and better incomes. This, in turn, enabled women to support their families better and protect their children.
Another example comes from Nigeria, where Imabong Sanusi runs a national anti-trafficking program focused on child protection. Along with volunteers across the country, she acts as a frontline monitor, identifying cases where children are being drawn into mines. Her work reflects a deep understanding of local realities.
When she encounters a child in labour, one priority is ensuring the child’s voice is heard, so people understand the lived impact of that work. This can be a powerful motivator for action. She also undertakes careful casework to identify alternative care arrangements, such as extended family members who may be better positioned to support the child. Children are rarely working because their guardians want them to; it is usually because something has broken down economically or socially. Reconnecting families, ensuring safety, and coordinating with government authorities requires trust, local relationships, and cultural understanding that only community-based actors possess.
We also need to rely on people on the ground to assess what is viable within education systems. That includes understanding where schools are located, how accessible they are, the quality of education being offered, and whether families believe schooling will lead to long-term opportunities. Questions about access to secondary education after primary school are fundamental. This is long-term work.
In an ideal scenario, all stakeholders are engaged: education providers, governments, companies making sustained community investments, women, men, and community leaders, with children’s welfare at the center. In some communities, there is support for company investment; in others, companies have created such harmful conditions that communities want them to leave. Outcomes depend entirely on local context and whether community leaders are meaningfully included in decision-making.
The essential shift is to center local voices, listen carefully, and move forward with solutions that are genuinely sustainable rather than imposed from the outside.
Jacobsen: Women’s empowerment is often framed as a universal concept, but each culture and country interprets empowerment differently. Could you offer a brief concluding note on how to remain sensitive to cultural context when empowering women?
Scharff: I would return to the principle of listening to women on the ground about what will advance them and their communities, and what their priorities actually are. As you noted, those priorities differ by context.
We work across a wide range of modern slavery issues. For example, The Freedom Fund works in Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia on child labour in private homes, which is often invisible. Globally, child domestic work accounts for an estimated 10 million children, making it one of the largest categories of child labour after agriculture. Many of these children are girls.
In some cases, a family brings a girl from a rural area to help with household chores while also sending her to school. In other cases, the situation is deeply exploitative: the girl may not receive adequate food or sleep and may not attend school at all. Boys are affected as well, but girls are disproportionately represented. These situations are complex, mainly because the households involved may themselves be economically vulnerable.
In that context, girls’ and women’s empowerment means listening to survivors who have grown up and become advocates, and to women working on the ground who understand how to bring about long-term change. That includes engaging everyone involved: the household where the child is working, the child’s own family, and community leaders. It means promoting dialogue so communities can move forward together.
Ultimately, it comes down to centring frontline actors, especially women, and following their lead. For those of us who are globally connected, one of the most meaningful roles we can play is providing platforms, helping raise resources, and amplifying the voices of those closest to the problem.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate your expertise, and we will be in touch shortly.
Scharff: Thank you. It was good to speak with you. Take care.
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