ACE
Information on the purpose of your organization
ACE's vision is to create the world that child rights are ensured, and children can live with hope and security. To this end, ACE's mission is to eradicate and prevent child labour in the world.
Information on your programmes and activities in areas relevant to the subject of the Summit and in which country or counties they are carried out.
Subject: Child Labour(Goal 8, Target 8.7 )
ACE started 1997 and organized the Global March against Child Labour in Japan. Since then, ACE has been leading NGO in Japan working on child labour issue.
Our Unique approach is to address demand and supply of child labour.
We have field projects to address the supply-side of child labour; poverty, education, awareness in communities. Focusing on child labour in agriculture, ACE projects address the cocoa industry in Ghana and the cotton industry in India. ACE has rescued more than 1200 children from child labour and succeeded in giving proper education to the children in each of its project communities. We also support families for income generation.
Subject:Education(Goal 4)
Child labour and Education are closely related and they are sides of the coin. In our field program, we capacity build teachers and education administration to realize quality education. We mobilize resource to build schools and classrooms.
Subject: Poverty (Goal 1)
One of the major cause and result of child labour is poverty. We address issue through income generation activities, mutual funds, self-help groups and agriculture training for more sustainable production such as turning cocoa and cotton to organic and fair-trade.
Subject :Gender equality and empower all women and girls (Goal 5)
Child Labour is closely related to girl and women's issues. In India, we support girls above 15 who have never been school. We give skill training to provide them an opportunity to learn and sustain themselves. We face the issue of early marriage and we try persuading parents to at least finish education before they marry.
Subject:Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns(Goal 12)
To address demand side of child labour, we focus on consumption and business in Japan. We promote ethical consumption, and we partner with companies to have their product free of child labour. One of the major chocolate company, MORINAGA, has partnered with ACE and through "1 choco for 1 smile" campaign they provide us donation to implement the field projects in Ghana. Furthermore, they have used cocoa grown in our project communities and had made fair-trade chocolate in their regular item. This is for the first time national chocolate brand has turned their regular product into fair-trade product.
Information on activities at the national or international levels
1)Campaign and advocacy
ACE started "Stop child labour network Japan" in 2004 and since then as a secretariat organization we have led national campaigns and petitions to raise awareness of public and advocate more efforts to Japanese government.
As for campaign we support ILO's Red card campaign and we provided "red card to child labour"cards and ask them to take a photo with cards to show their will to end child labour. This year more than 5 thousand people participated.
As for advocacy, this year we have collected 500,000 petitions to ask Japanese government for below:
1.Post-2015 Development Goals Agenda focuses on sustainable development that is centered on people and their fundamental rights. We ask for proactive actions in mainstreaming the elimination of child labour as part of Official Development Assistance (ODA)?s initiatives in reducing poverty, driving universal primary education and youth employment.
2.In addition to mainstreaming the elimination of child labour as part of foreign trade policy, we request the government to proactively influence companies about their social responsibilities against child labour.
Since 2008 we have collected more than 1.7 million petitions in total. And in partnership with the Global March against Child Labour, we have submitted part of them to the Secretary General in the beginning of this year when Mr.Kailash Satyarthi met him in person.
2) CSR and child labour
As abolishing child labour is included in the UN Global Compact, and because of the Raggie framework and ISO26000, Japanese companies are more keen on child labour in supply chain. We provide consulting service to companies, give lectures at the seminars to help companies practice due-deligence to prevent child labour ACE President Ms. Iwatsuki is a committee member of Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Social Responsibility for Sustainable Future (2009～) coordinated by Japanese Government. She was also a member of rio+20 mutlistakeholder preparation group in Japan.
3)Public awareness, citizen's participation
We have various ways to communicate about child labour to different audience.
Annually we are invited to speak around 100 times at various venues such as schools, clubs, companies and public symposiums etc. We have made original educational materials for teachers to teach about child labour and sustainable consumption in participatory group work and it is used widely in Japan. We had published a book about Child Labour ?I am 8 years old, I don?t want to work anymore?（Godo-Shuppan, 2007）and 15,000 copies has been sold. Famous Japanese Poet, Shuntaro Tanikawa, has written a poem for ACE and its short-movie has been seen by many people. We had made movie "Valentine Ikki" and more then 10,000 people has seen it.
Organization have an annual report? (YES/NO) (should contain financial statements and a list of financial sources and contributions, including governmental contributions)?
YES -
2013-02_Report1.pdf
List of members of the governing body of your organization, and their countries of nationality
Yuka (Onoe) Iwatsuki, Japan,
Tomoko (Baba) Shiroki, Japan
Yutaka Kobayashi,Japan
Takao Yasunaga, Japan
Daisuke Shintani,Japan
Copy of the constitution and/or by-laws of the organization (WORD or PDF only), or a weblink to it
AOI-ACE1.pdf
