The Action on Children’s Harmful Work in African Agriculture (ACHA) have launched their website, which will act as the centre for the research and evidence coming out of the seven-year, DFID-funded research programme that started in January 2020.

The aim of the programme is to build evidence on:

• The forms, drivers, and experiences of children’s harmful work in African agriculture.
• Interventions that are effective in preventing harm that arises in the course of children’s work.

Creating an evidence base

The majority of children’s work in Africa is within the agricultural sector. However, there is insufficient evidence on the prevalence of harmful children’s work across different agricultural value chains, farming systems and agro-ecologies. Little is understood about the effects of different types of value chains and models of value chain coordination on the nature of harmful children’s work or the effectiveness of different interventions to address this type of labour. These issues are central to ACHA’s work.

Working with partners

ACHA is a collaborative programme led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). ACHA is directed by Professor Rachel Sabates-Wheeler (r.sabates-wheeler@ids.ac.uk) and Dr James Sumberg (j.sumberg@ids.ac.uk).

The ACHA partnership includes African Rights Initiative International, University of Bath, University of Bristol, University of Development Studies in Legon, University of Ghana, University of Sussex, the Fairtrade Foundation, ISEAL Alliance, Rainforest Alliance, The Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (University At Buffalo), The International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) and The Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH).


Cover image credit: Menychle Meseret Abebe on Flickr.