OLAM Turkey Works in The Origin of The Seasonal Migrant Workers Under The Village Motherhood Programe
Since 2017, Olam cooperates with the Foundation for the Support of Women's Work (KEDV) in a project titled as “Empowering Women and Children at Hazelnut Harvest.”
With this project, KEDV and Olam aim to contribute to the efforts to eliminate child and forced labor in hazelnut harvest by developing and implementing pilot programs aiming at children and women. With this purpose, KEDV has following objectives:
⦁ Building capacity among women workers by raising their knowledge on labor rights with particular focus on forced labor and child labor and skills on financial literacy by delivering sessions during and after harvest season, which will allow them to manage their earnings and avoid debt bondage.
⦁ Responding the children’s development and educational needs through implementing programs during and after the harvest
⦁ Increasing women's leadership skills to organize around and take action for their own and community priorities.
⦁ Promoting a participatory dialogue and joint initiatives for a supportive environment and better living standards for workers with the leadership of women
This project seeks following long-term impacts:
⦁ Women’s self-confidence, visibility and status in family and their communities will have increased.
⦁ The children’s development and education needs will have better responded.
⦁ The hazelnut workers’ living standards and access to services and aids will increase with improvement in availability of the services and programs and increase in awareness and demand of the workers.
⦁ The awareness on child labor will increase in the workers and in local communities in the project locations.
⦁ The relations between the workers and host communities will have improved. Farmers will be introduced with child-safe areas and will provide safe conditions for migrant workers’ children.
⦁ The number of joint initiatives to prevent child and forced labor will increased with various stakeholders and communities.
⦁ The opportunities will have created for alternative livelihoods especially for young women under the higher risk of forced labor with the help of partner companies and other stakeholder.
Village Motherhood Program
Village Motherhood is a program by which the women are trained as village mothers and provide one-to-one support to the other mothers living in the same village in observing their children’s development and responding their development and educational needs and in accessing available services and programs through house visits and when needed outside activities. Village Motherhood program takes place in the city of Mardin, where most of the seasonal migrant workers live (their hometown). Upon consultation with Olam, FLA, Pikolo working with labor contractors, field visits to the potential districts and discussion with workers, Foundation for the Support of Women’s Work (KEDV) and Olam chose Mardin’s Kızıltepe village to implement the programs.
⦁ After more than 5 visits (with many house meetings with women), 14 women agreed on participating and working in the program.
⦁ At the same time, KEDV has been working on the program content and materials for village motherhood and empowerment trainings.
⦁ The training of village mothers was designed as 3-phase one as the group has low literacy habits and unfamiliar to such structured trainings with many new topics including child development and education, worker’s rights, gender, topics relevant to field study, reporting etc. The training was implemented as first phase on 20-22 December 2017 in Mardin.
⦁ Second phase on 27-29 December 2017 and the third phase on 11-12 January 2018. Finally, 8 women are being trained as village mothers.
⦁ Simultaneously, KEDV and Olam worked with labor contractor and village mothers to come up with a list of houses to be visited within the programs.
⦁ KEDV also started collaboration with local authorities such as Directorate of National Education, Directorate of Health, Local Employment Agency in Kızıltepe to engage them in the project and to initiate a dialogue to be able to ensure coordination amongst the local authorities in Kızıltepe and harvest locations.
⦁ Village mothers who are trained will provide training to other women in the working group for upcoming 12 months of the year.