The toolkit will be designed to mitigate wider child rights infringements in ASM communities.
RCS Global provides data-driven environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance, responsible sourcing and responsible mining assurance and advisory. The company's Better Mining programme continuously monitors and supports the improvement of conditions on and around ASM sites, and its current scope includes more than 40 ASM sites in the Great Lakes region of Africa that mine cobalt, copper, gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten.
UNICEF is one the of world's leading humanitarian and development agencies and operates in over 190 countries and territories. It has a specific focus on helping disadvantaged and marginalised children to lead safe, healthy lives., and each year the organisation protects and supports millions of children around the world via initiatives such as development programmes, advocacy and rapid humanitarian response.
Together, RCS Global and UNICEF will co-develop a toolkit to allow mine operators and supply chain stakeholders to identify violations of child rights more successfully and to implement best practice social protection measures in the ASM context. This initiative is part of UNICEF's Mitigating Child Rights Deprivations in ASM Communities project, which is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) cooperation fund ‘We Stop Child Labor'.
The toolkit will include actionable guidance for engagement with children and parents on and around ASM sites. It will also feature health and safety measures, including access control to sites, as well as stakeholder engagement, including with local authorities and civil society organisations.
Once complete, there are plans to trial the toolkit on at least two ASM mine sites that already employ RCS Global's Better Mining programme.
RCS Global noted that the technical cooperation is highly innovative, as it allows the formal integration of the toolkit's recommendations to be integrated into the digital application of its Better Mining programme, which complements its database of over 300 mitigation measures for a variety of risk factors in the ASM sector. This will allow the approach to be immediately replicated across mines that are already in the programme, which will fast track direct and practical impact.
The next step is for RCS Global and UNICEF to work together to promote the toolkit and roll it out across ASM communities and global supply chain actors. The project is scheduled for completion and to begin international adoption by June 2022.
Dr Nicholas Garrett, CEO of RCS Global Group, said: "We are excited to be developing this new approach in collaboration with UNICEF. Child rights infringements and child labour in ASM won't end through disengagement. Instead, the international community, not least stakeholders in the ASM supply chain, need to take an "engage and improve" approach. This new toolkit will enable this to happen."
Daniella Savic, mining partnerships coordinator at UNICEF DRC, added: "Child rights infringements linked to artisanal mining are a persistent issue across a vast range of resources in geographies from cobalt to gold. We have been actively involved in working to address this challenge and this project with RCS Global technical expertise will allow us to systematise, harmonise the interventions on the ground, and scale a common and holistic approach through our entire network."
