ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on extensive empirical research carried out across the Dominican Republic cocoa sector as part of a larger British Academy–funded project entitled Clothes, Chocolate, and Children: Realising the Transparency Dividend. The research findings illustrate how domestic efforts to comply with national, regional, and global targets to improve equity in education and eradicate child labor had a direct and, at times, detrimental impact on traditional forms of nonhazardous child work taking place on family-owned cocoa plantations. We argue that these new educational reforms failed to take into account the lived experiences of communities and the contribution of children to the cocoa sector or consider further opportunities for educational development beyond the classroom. Most concerningly, the chapter highlights how the removal of Dominican children from family-owned farms resulted in the proliferation and invisibilization of other, more precarious forms of labor through the use of child workers from neighboring Haiti.
