Continuous education needed to combat forced labour – Chamber of Agribusiness

The Director of Partnerships at the Chamber of Agribusiness, Christian Mensah Sewordor, has said it is very important to have more and continuous education to help the fight against forced labour in the country.

According to him, a lot of individuals in the country who seek a job do not have any idea about the law; and that has been a tool used against them by their employers in some cases.

“The advocacy and orientation must go on, the education must be persistent; it must be continuous, and not just we have this programme and that becomes all. There must be consistent orientation of job owners/business owners, and this should go on in line with the Labour act,” Mr. Sewordor said.

Mr. Sewordor indicated that after massive education is provided for stakeholders in the labour sector, then action can be taken against business owners who disregard the law.

He said this during a training course organised to up-skill the Chamber of Agribusiness Ghana and General Agricultural Workers’ Union of Ghana (GAWU) on ‘Combatting Modern Slavery in Ghana’.

The programme seeks to facilitate the implementation of measures to identify, prevent and address modern slavery within the agricultural sector, and will also enhance the knowledge of individuals and communities on modern slavery practices so they can act to prevent such practices.

It again seeks to eliminate the involvement of child labour and women in agriculture plantations under conditions of servitude.

The programme targets agribusiness within the food and cash crops value chain, community leaders, smallholder farmers with 80 percent of women, children and like-minded Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

Speaking on contribution of the legal framework to the fight against forced labour, the Project Coordinator at GAWU, Bashiratu Kamal, said it has contributed significantly to the formal sector, but with the informal sector less has been done.

“To some extent, even within the Labour act itself, not every worker is protected; it does not cover every category of worker… like those in the informal sector. And we know that agric has a big informality embedded within it,” she noted.

According to her, the enforcement of certain laws within the sector is very challenging due to lack of adequate resources on the side of institutions responsible for doing so.

She called on the various institutions and stakeholders within the agribusiness sector to contribute greatly to the fight against forced labour to help the industry grow.