Social Responsibility

In A Nutshell

With the conviction that every child should be protected from any form of exploitation, BALSU has cooperated with “Genç Hayat Vakfı” (Young Lives Foundation) even back in 2008 to tackle the root causes of child labour in Türkiye. Through the foundation’s “In A Nutshell” project we opened summer schools that improve children academically, as well as socially to prevent them from working in hazelnut gardens. Keeping in mind that 1 out of every 2 child workers drops out of school completely, we provide the children in our project with financial aid for each school year whilst tracking their attendance in order to maintain their academic development. We also provide them food, school supplies, and various aid packages.

Until 2022, we have supported 11-17 years old 229 children’s education by giving them scholarship after reaching them in hazelnut crops and in other events.

We support the abolition of child labour, forced labour and coercive labour throughout our entire production chain. We do this through legal means, close ties with local communities and regular monitoring of suppliers, aiming to act as a sustainable development engine for these local communities.

Research tells us that “safe spaces” are among the top interventions in supporting children in harvest communities and in reducing the risks around child labour. For these, we have updated our model for it to be replicated and scaled up to reach greater number of children in the supply chain. Through our collaborations on the summer schools’ program, we provided access to education for the “5427” children of workers between 2014 and 2020. Over 12,000 thousand farmers and hazelnut workers received trainings.

A More Sustainable Supply Chain

We carried out activities in the Black Sea and Southeast regions to enhance the transparency of our supply chain. Also, we have communicated our company standards on labor rights to various stakeholder groups between 2016 – 2018 through USDOL project.

• 219 Labor contractors mapped
• 89 Labor contractors registered
• 256 Community members
• 139 Government officials trained
• 123 Teachers trained

While addressing systemic issues like child labour that requires a multi-stakeholder approach, we partner with the government, the industry, our clients, NGOs and academia; we develop supply chain trainings; promote community capacity building and investment in order to:

• Protect human and children rights
• Sustainably increase crop and yield
• Preserve the environment