Child Labor

At Mondelēz International, we are committed to making our snacks the right way, protecting the planet and respecting the human rights of people in our value chain, using the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UNGPs”) as a framework for preventing and addressing associated risks. Servitude, forced labor and human trafficking (“modern slavery”) are issues of increasing global concern, affecting many sectors around the world. Modern slavery is fundamentally unacceptable, and our rejection of modern slavery is a key element of our commitment to respect human rights. We fully endorse and support the principles established in the ILO Conventions No. 138 (Minimum Age Convention) and No. 182 (Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention) and are committed to help combat child labor by following the ILO-IOE Child Labor Guidance Tool for Business of December 15, 2015.

Our dedicated Human Rights policy, together with our Code of Conduct, demonstrates our long-standing commitment to respect the human rights of people within our own operations and in our value chain.

We seek to do business with partners who share the same commitment, as laid out in our Supplier & Partner Code of Conduct, which is aligned with our Human Rights policy. In addition, our supplier contracts include provisions on our Corporate Responsibility Expectations including forced and child labor.

In the cocoa supply chain, we have developed thorough approaches to identify potential human rights impacts through our signature cocoa sustainability program Cocoa Life. In 2022, leveraging our 10 years of experience and learnings with our Cocoa Life program, we released our new Strategy to Help Protect Children. The strategy details our approach to help enhance child protection systems and improve access to quality education in Cocoa Life communities. This brings us closer to accomplishing our 2030 goals and ultimate vision to collaborate with others to help work towards a cocoa sector that is free of child labor. The strategy focuses on three primary areas of response, which mirror UNICEF’s international child protection system strengthening standards:

  1. Prevention efforts: To help prevent and support children at risk of child labor, our approach seeks to help combat the underlying causes of child labor, with a particular focus on helping to empower communities.
  2. Monitoring & remediation: Beyond our efforts to help prevent child labor, we engage in monitoring to help identify cases of child labor and children at risk so they can receive support and remediation through community-based Child Labor Monitoring & Remediation Systems (CLMRS).
  3. Helping enable systemic solutions: Recognizing that combating child labor requires structural strengthening of systems in a way that alleviates the underlying causes of child labor, we seek to collaborate with others to help enable systemic solutions over time.

Underpinning our strategy is the reality that helping to combat child labor is a shared goal and requires a collaborative process of partnership with governments, suppliers, communities, NGO partners, peer companies and multi-sector partners. That’s why we use multi-stakeholder engagement to help improve access to education. We are a part of the Child Learning and Education Facility (CLEF), a collaboration between the Jacobs Foundation, the UBS Optimus Foundation, the Ivorian government and the broader cocoa sector. The collaboration aims to reach approximately five million children in cocoa-growing areas and beyond with a focus on access to quality primary education. We seek to support the development of a similar initiative in Ghana.