RIGHTS-KENYA: New Pressure to End Child Labour

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Joyce Mulama

NAIROBI, Apr 2 2005 (IPS) - Pressure is mounting on the government of Kenya to urgently establish a law seeking to make free primary education compulsory if the East African country is to achieve its goal of eliminating child labour by 2020.

The government announced Mar. 31 its commitment to end all forms of child labour in the next 15 years. It is using the Children’s Act, enacted by parliament in 2001, to outlaw the abuses.

“Permitting children to work in the worst forms of child labour amounts to serious neglect…The recently enacted Children’s Act holds parents accountable for negligence of their children. I would like to sound a warning that the government will vigorously enforce the provisions of the Children’s Act and promptly prosecute offenders,’’ Nancy Kirui, the permanent secretary at the ministry of labour and human resource development, said Mar. 31.

She made the remark in Kenya’s capital Nairobi Mar. 31 following a demonstration against child labour, organised a day before the launch of the Time Bound Programme, an International Labour Organisation (ILO) funded project.

The project seeks to compel governments to implement the ILO convention 182, and put a time frame upon when to end child labor. Adopted in 1999, the convention requires member states to prohibit and eliminate the worst forms of child labour, which include commercial sex exploitation, domestic labour, and working in commercial agricultural sectors such as plantations and fisheries.

ILO statistics show that 246 million children worldwide are child labourers, with Asia and the Pacific accounting for the largest proportion of working children – 127 million. Sub-Saharan Africa has 48 million.

Child labourers are exploited economically and forced to work over long hours with no time off and low wages. They often lack social as well as legal protection.

Kenya has 1.9 million working children aged between five and 17, according to the country’s Central Bureau of Statistics. About 34 percent of the children are in commercial agriculture and fisheries, 23.6 percent in subsistence agriculture and 17.9 in the domestic sector.

ILO says, in addition to enforcing the Children’s Act, Kenyan authorities should make free education a must, pull children out of work and keep them in school.

“The government needs to make free education compulsory and a law would greatly help to enforce it,” Joyce Waituti, ILO country programme coordinator, told IPS.

Introduced in 2003, the free education initiative saw an additional 1.3 million children, previously locked out of the education system enroll in schools. But some 1.5 million children still remain out of school, according to last year’s United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report.

Waituti says the issue of nutrition should also be addressed to enable children to take advantage of free education. ‘’If there is no food in the house, the child will not make it to school. We need to look at free education not just as the provision of books only, but must encompass issues of nutrition as well,” she explained.

A source at the ministry of education described the nutrition issues as teething problems, which, he said, were being addressed. “The government is aware and nutrition is seriously being taken into consideration. In fact, there are plans in the pipeline to provide food supplements to some of the schools,” the official, who requested anonymity, told IPS.

Analysts say parents’ inability to provide nutrition and basic school requirements to their school-going children demonstrates poverty at household level.

In a research conducted recently on child labour in commercial agriculture covering coffee, rice and sugar plantations by the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE), poverty was cited as a major cause of child labour. About 37 percent of the children interviewed said they worked to supplement the family income and pay for school fees. Thirty percent said they just accompanied their parents during peak agricultural seasons.

“Even as we seek to achieve a child-labour free country, we must first and foremost address the issue of poverty. This can be done by improving our economic performance through coming up with policies that promote private sector participation, which will create employment opportunities,” Titus Waithaka, FKE’s head of research and advocacy, observed.

According to official statistics, about 56 percent of Kenyans live below the poverty line of less than a dollar a day.

Waithaka noted that poverty in the East African nation had been exacerbated by HIV/AIDS, which had created orphans and child-headed households, whereby children had no choice but to engage in child labour in order to provide for their siblings.

Truphosa Atieno, 16, testifying at the Mar. 31 demonstration in Nairobi, said: “My parents died in 2001 from HIV/AIDS, leaving me to take care of my three sisters and two brothers. Since we had no one else to help us financially, I came to Nairobi to look for something that could earn me an income. I was employed as a domestic worker, where I was earning about eight dollars a month. I used to send the money upcountry to my grandmother who I left to care for my sisters and brothers.’’

Atieno has enrolled in a dressmaking college in Nairobi and hopes to generate a decent income upon completion of her training.

Official statistics show that there are more than one million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS, a pandemic whose prevalence rate currently stands at seven percent. More than two million Kenyans out of a population of over 30 million are living with HIV/AIDS, according to the ministry of health.