Rado, a human rights lawyer and graduate of the Global Campus’s LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa (Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria), has produced a research report and a companion toolkit on child labour in Madagascar’s vanilla and centella supply chains, developed under the Global Campus Alumni’s 2025–26 Cross-Regional Alumni-Led Activities. The two outputs are practical siblings: one diagnoses the problem with as much rigour as the evidence allows; the other hands auditors, cooperatives and buyers the forms to do something about it.
The diagnosis resists sounding more alarming than the facts warrant. Vanilla, grown in Madagascar‘s north-eastern SAVA region, is unusually well documented: an ILO/USDOL baseline survey found that nearly a third of sampled children had worked in the preceding year, mostly in agriculture generally rather than vanilla specifically, and that two-thirds of working children were in conditions classified as hazardous—heavy loads, unsupervised machetes, scalding water used to cure beans. Centella is a case study in the limits of sourcing-side evidence: no household survey exists, only picker and buyer reports pointing to the low per-kilogram pay that pulls children into collection elsewhere. The report refuses to blur that distinction.
“Being able to say that vanilla has a rigorous commodity-specific survey and centella does not—and that this asymmetry should shape where practitioners direct resources—is more useful than a document that treats all commodities as equally documented when they are not,” Rado told us.
That discipline extends to his own fieldwork. An interview with a labour controller from a regional child-labour committee in Moramanga, and a situation note from two centella-collection sites, are presented not as proof of a national pattern but as single, attributable testimony—useful precisely because it is honest about its limits. It is also, in places, startling: only one child-labour case from the region has ever reached a tribunal, and retail businesses have reportedly presented child workers as “dependants” to sidestep labour inspection.
The toolkit turns this into something a field officer can actually use: a risk-screening template, minimum supplier expectations, an age-verification and safe-recruitment checklist, and a referral pathway for suspected cases—each insistent that no child be punished, and no family abandoned, once a case is found.
The full research report and toolkit are available from the Global Campus of Human Rights Repository: https://doi.org/10.25330/3214
