Ford’s Plan To Fight Child Labor With Blockchain

The automotive giant Ford is in the featured news on our DC Forecasts crypto news site today – mainly for its plan to fight child labor with blockchain. One of the oldest car manufacturers out there has recently entered a partnership with IBM, Huayou Cobalt and LG Chem in order to build a blockchain platform that will monitor the supply of cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of a new attempt that will see Ford ensuring that no child labor makes part of its supply chain.

First announced on Wednesday, this project will be managed by the global responsible-sourcing consultant RCS Group – and will use IBM’s proprietary blockchain platform to monitor the cobalt supplies that are used in the production of lithium-ion batteries.

In times when other primary production industries are tapping into blockchain technology as a potential solution for effective supply chain tracking, Ford is definitely interested in tracking metals but has a problem with child labor which is being tackled with the deployment of blockchain technology.

What’s also important to note are the many challenges for tracking metals. Speaking of, they present an altogether different challenge for the monitoring project because they are often smelted together, at which point it becomes almost impossible to identify what came from where.

However, the main challenge that Ford is ready to solve is the one posed by artisanal miners and unregistered local panhandlers using children for labor – mainly dealt with by bringing them into a blockchain network of validated participants so that the labor is transparent and everyone can see where cobalt supplies are coming from.