ETP
Improving the lives of women and children in the tea estates of Assam
In 2014, UNICEF signed a partnership with the Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP) to address the issue of child protection and girls’ empowerment in tea communities in three districts of Assam, India: Dibrugarh, Tinsukia and Sivasagar.
The programme ensures that 35,286 adolescent girls have the knowledge, skills and confidence to protect themselves and to make informed decisions about their future. By forming Child Protection Committees to create a protective community-based safety net, approximately 30,000 community members have been equipped with skills to protect children from violence, exploitation and abuse.
To complement these community-based interventions, UNICEF has made significant progress in influencing policies and systems at all levels of government and industry to strengthen the child protection measures and to ensure that these changes are sustainable and scalable.
The second phase of the UNICEF-ETP programme, which started January 2018, is scaling up the child protection model and expand the focus to address a broader range of issues including health, nutrition, education, water and sanitation (WASH) and business practice change. The programme now covers six districts (we have added Sonitpur, Udalguri and Golaghat) and aims to impact the women, children and adolescents living in 206 tea gardens, reaching more than 250,000 beneficiaries. The programme seeks to deliver progress against SDGs 1-6, 8, 9 and 12.
UNICEF is proud to partner with ETP to support the realisation of the rights of children, adolescents and women in tea gardens across Assam and helping them to realise their survival, development, participation and protection by reducing inequities and inequalities based on gender, region and ethnicity with strengthened delivery mechanisms.