In 2013, the International Labour Organization opened a doorway for change in Türkiye's hazelnut fields, where generations of children had been harvesting crops instead of attending school. With backing from CAOBISCO, a trade association of chocolate and cocoa manufacturers, and partnership with the Turkish Ministry of Labour and Social Security, the ILO Office for Türkiye launched an ambitious public-private collaboration designed to dismantle child labour in seasonal agriculture—one of the world's most entrenched and invisible forms of exploitation.
For more than a decade, this partnership has worked to transform the lives of children in seasonal agricultural worker families across the country's vast hazelnut-growing regions. The initiative represents something rarer than it should be: a sustained commitment to systemic change, not a one-year intervention or a single rescue effort. Seasonal agriculture creates particular vulnerability for children because their families move with the harvest, making them difficult to reach with traditional school systems and social protections. Hazelnut harvesting, concentrated in Türkiye—which produces more than half the world's hazelnuts—employs thousands of seasonal workers, many with school-age children who historically worked alongside their parents.
What makes this partnership distinctive is its refusal of simplistic solutions. Rather than simply removing children from fields, the ILO and its partners worked to address the root causes: poverty that forces families to send children to work, lack of alternative childcare during harvest seasons, limited access to quality education, and gaps in enforcement of existing child labour laws. The collaboration brought together government regulators with private-sector actors—companies with genuine economic stakes in how hazelnut production happened—creating aligned incentives for change.
Over thirteen years, the partnership has created measurable impact. By focusing on both prevention and education, the program has succeeded in shifting the calculus for families in seasonal agriculture. Children who might have spent months harvesting hazelnuts alongside parents now attend school instead. The initiative has built systems and trained inspectors, supported family economic alternatives, and created pathways for agricultural workers' children to access education without their families losing income.
This work matters not just for Türkiye but as a model for global supply chains. Hazelnut chocolate, consumed worldwide, had long been produced at a cost borne by children who never saw a classroom. The partnership demonstrates that eliminating child labour from agricultural supply chains is not merely a moral imperative—it is achievable through sustained collaboration between public institutions and private actors willing to invest in systemic solutions.
The journey from field to school, for thousands of children, was written together. It required patience, coordination across sectors that rarely speak to each other, and a willingness to tackle poverty and inequality at their roots rather than manage symptoms. Thirteen years in, with that documentary record now created, the work continues. Because as the partnership's guiding principle states simply: every child has the right to education, protection, and hope for the future. In Türkiye's hazelnut fields, that right is slowly becoming a reality.