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EDUCATION: EU Asked to Counter Child Labour

Stefania Bianchi

BRUSSELS, Mar 18 2004 (IPS) - The EU must promote education as a way of eliminating child labour in developing countries, says an alliance of civil society groups.

The two issues “are inextricably linked” and “one cannot be achieved without the other,” says a delegation of NGOs in Brussels for the launch of a campaign ‘Stop child labour – school is the best place to work’.

The delegation is led by Shantha Sinha, secretary of the Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya (MV) Foundation, which has been working in southern India to stop child labour. The delegation is in Brussels to take its message to the European Commission (the EU executive) and to members of the European Parliament.

“The European Union must spread the message that it is possible to eradicate child labour and raise awareness of this problem,” Sinha told IPS.

Three European NGOs – Hivos (Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries) from Denmark, Concern from Ireland and Welthungerhilfe from Germany – say the EU “must take the lead in promoting their campaign.”

A report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) says some 246 million children between 5 and 17 years of age are working as child labourers, while 113 million children of primary school age never go to school.

Sinha says the impact of the Indian NGO’s campaign has been “extremely positive”. In the past 10 years nearly 150,000 children have been enrolled and retained in schools, she says. “Our schools are becoming overcrowded, and there is a teacher shortage.”

The European NGOs are now looking to the EU and other civil society groups to support this campaign to make it even more effective.

The group says the EU currently has a “very weak” external rights policy, while its policy on child labour is “non-existent”. It is asking the EU “to create a coherent policy on the elimination of child labour linked to the provision of full- time, formal education for all children up to 14 years of age.”

The group is also asking EU member states to allocate at least 8 percent of Overseas Development Aid (ODA) to formal primary education, “including strategies to integrate all out-of-school children into the education system.”

The group is finally asking the EU to make provisions in ODA “to ensure that girls and young children from vulnerable groups are integrated into the formal school system.”

The EU recognises that education is a key aspect of poverty eradication and to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The MDGs are an ambitious agenda agreed by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in New York September 2000. One of these is to achieve universal primary education by 2015.

This year the EU has introduced a target of 20 percent of its budget to be allocated to basic education and health.

But the NGOs describe the EU’s track record on education as “alarming”.

In 2002 just 0.33 percent of ODA was allocated to basic education in the Community budget and the European Development Fund (EDF) which finances developing countries.

The NGO group says the problem has been largely “ignored” up to now because governments and citizens believe it is “a way of life”.

“People think that child labour is an intrinsic evil that they can’t do anything about, so it goes further and further down the list,” says Michael Doorly from Concern.

There are lessons here for NGOs too, Doorly says. “This campaign has forced NGOs to look at their own education policies and see what we’re not doing. We are learning from the experiences of MV in India.”

The NGOs plan to spread the campaign to other developing countries in Africa and Asia.