Along a street in the historic center of Lima, 11-year-old Pedro makes chalk drawings on the sidewalk for at least four hours a day to bring some money home. He is one of thousands of children and adolescents in Peru who work as child laborers, which violates their human rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jul 29 2022 (IPS)

In the afternoons he draws with chalk on the sidewalk of a downtown street in the Peruvian capital. Passersby drop coins into a small blue jar he has set out. He remains silent in response to questions from IPS, but a nearby ice cream vendor says his name is Pedro, he is 11 years old, and he draws every day on the ground for about four hours.

Pedro, too shy or scared to answer, is one of the children and adolescents between the ages of five and 17 engaged in child labor in Peru, a phenomenon that grew during the years of the pandemic due to the rise in poverty, which by 2021 affected a quarter of the population.

According to official figures, children and adolescents involved in child labor number 870,000 nationwide, some 210,000 more than in 2019, Isaac Ruiz, a social worker and director of the non-governmental Centre for Social Studies and Publications (Cesip), told IPS in an interview.

Cesip has been working for 46 years advocating for the rights of children and adolescents."For every year of education that a child loses, he or she also loses between 10 and 20 percent of income in his or her adult life; poverty is reproduced." -- Isaac Ruiz

Ruiz explained that in order to define child labor, two concepts must be separated. The first refers to the economic activities that children between five and 17 years of age perform in support of their families for payment or not, as dependent workers for third parties, or for themselves.

The second is work that violates their rights and must be eradicated, which is addressed by national laws and regulations in accordance with international human rights standards established by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and other agencies.

The ILO classifies child labor as a violation of fundamental human rights, which is detrimental to children’s development and can lead to physical or psychological damage that will last a lifetime. Child labor qualifies as work that is harmful to the physical and mental development of children.

On the contrary, it is not child labor, according to the agency, when children or adolescents participate in stimulating activities, voluntary tasks or occupations that do not affect their health and personal development, nor interfere with their education. For example, helping parents at home or earning money doing a few chores or odd jobs.

The minimum working age in Peru is 14 years old. Work is classified as child labor when it is performed below that age, when it is dangerous by its very nature or because of the conditions in which it is performed, and when the workday exceeds the legally established limit, which is 24 hours per week if the child is 14 years old, and 36 hours per week if the child is between 15 and 17.

The worst forms of child labor are when adults use children and adolescents for criminal activities or exploit them commercially or sexually.

Juan Diego Carayonqui, 15, poses for a photo on the street where his home and the small store on its first floor are located in Huachipa, a low-income neighborhood on the outskirts of Lima. He works 49 hours a week in the small family business, longer than the hours legally stipulated for adolescents in Peru. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

According to figures from the government’s National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (Inei), 1,752,000 children and adolescents were working in 2021. That number was 2.6 percent higher than the pre-pandemic 25 percent recorded in 2019.

Of this total, 13.7 percent are engaged in hazardous activities, which means that 870,000 minors between the ages of five and 17 engage in work that poses a risk to their physical and mental health and integrity.

In this South American country of around 33,035,000 people, children and adolescents in this age range represent 19 percent, or about 6,400,000, of the population according to INEI data.

“Not all economic activities carried out by children and adolescents must be eradicated. If they have a formative role, for example helping out in a family business for an hour a day or on weekends, and they go to school, have time for their homework, to socialize, and for recreation, they will probably be learning about the business,” said Ruiz.

But, he added, “the situation changes when it becomes child labor, when the activities are hazardous.

“Child labor is when it is beyond their physical, emotional or mental capabilities and when it takes up too much of their time and competes negatively with education, homework and the possibility of recreation,” he explained.

As examples, he cited selling things on the street going from car to car, picking through waste in garbage dumps, carrying packages or crates in markets, doing domestic work, or working in mines or agricultural activities where they are exposed to toxic substances harmful to their health.

The government must accelerate the design and application of public policies for the eradication of child labor, Ruiz said.

“For every year of education that a child loses, he or she also loses between 10 and 20 percent of income in his or her adult life; poverty is reproduced,” he said.

The expert called for measures to correct this situation in order to prevent child workers from continuing to be left behind in terms of opportunities and rights.

“If I had children I wouldn’t make them work,” says Juan Diego Carayonqui, who since the age of seven has spent his afternoons working in their small family store to help his mother, with whom he poses in the shop where he spends a large part of his day. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

“I would not make my children work”

Juan Daniel Carayonqui is 15 years old and since the age of seven has been working in the small shop that operates out of his home, located in Huachipa, a poor hilly neighborhood on the outskirts of the capital with an estimated population of 32,000 inhabitants, mostly people who have come to the city from other parts of the country.

His mother, María Huamaní, arrived in Lima at the age of 10 from the central Andes highlands department of Ayacucho, fleeing the civil war that killed her mother and father. Orphaned, she was raised by aunts and uncles. Eventually she met the man who would become her husband and together they started a family. In their view, work is the way to progress in life.

In a park near his house, Carayonqui told IPS: “I started working when I was seven years old in the store, with simple tasks, memorizing the prices of the products. Then I gained experience and learned how to deal with customers, and now I work in the afternoons when I get out of school.”

Carayonqui is in his fourth year of high school, which he will finish in 2023, and his goal is to study biology at university. His dream is to travel around the country; he loves nature and dreams of discovering some unknown species and helping to bring new value to Peru’s biodiversity.

He has spent much of eight of his 15 years behind the counter of the store where he sells groceries and stationery products, from 2:00 in the afternoon until closing time, about seven hours a day. This adds up to 49 hours a week, so Carayonqui would officially be considered a victim of child labor.

But in his family’s view, work is the road to progress. His paternal grandmother, who also moved to Huachipa from the highlands, has a garden where she grows vegetables to sell at the wholesale market. Carayonqui helps her out on Wednesdays, carrying the heaviest bundles.

“My grandmother says that through work you overcome poverty and achieve your dreams, but I think it’s better to overcome it by studying,” he said.

Carayonqui knows that as a good son he must help his mother when she asks him to: “I have to help her because she needs me and because I love her.” But he also understands that spending his entire childhood and adolescence working has deprived him of focusing on his homework, of going out to play with his friends, of having fun.

He gets up every day at six in the morning, gets ready to go to school now that classrooms are open again this year post-pandemic, has breakfast and goes to school. He comes home at 1:30 p.m., eats lunch and by 2:00 p.m. he is at the store. His mother often leaves him in charge because she has other work to do.

If he has children, he will not do the same thing, he says. “I would encourage them to be responsible but I would not make them work, I would encourage them to study in order to get out of poverty,” he said.

Margoth Vásquez, a 17-year-old Peruvian teenager, worked 72 hours a week as a nanny and housekeeper during the pandemic to earn an income and cover her needs, she told IPS during an interview in a neighbor’s living room near her home on the outskirts of Lima. Her goal is to finish high school this year and begin to study nursing the following year. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Overexploitation

Margoth Vásquez also lives in Huachipa. She is 17 years old and was interviewed by IPS at the home of one of her mother’s friends. She wants to remodel her family home with what she earns as a nurse; her dream is to study nursing.

During the pandemic, she had to work to buy what she needed and pay off a debt. Her father, who doesn’t live with her and doesn’t pay alimony, gave her a chest of drawers for her birthday, which he didn’t pay for: she had to.

She took work caring for an eight-month-old baby and cleaning the family’s home from 6:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday. In exchange for working as a housekeeper and nanny for more than 72 hours a week she earned about 150 dollars a month.

She worked there for a year and a half. But it was stressful because she could not find time to do her homework and turn it in (classes were online because of the pandemic). This year she will finish high school and next year she will apply to study nursing.

“I want to help my grandmother who raised me, take care of her, get married, have children. To have a good life,” she said.

Child Rights Advocate and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kailash Satyarthi urged participants at the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, organised by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Durban, South Africa, to put their efforts to eliminate child labour back on track. Credit: Cecilia Russell/IPS

By Sania Farooqui
Durban, May 15 2022 (IPS)

The Global Estimate on Child Labour estimates 160 million children are in child labour worldwide – an increase of 8.4 million children in the last four years – with millions more at risk due to the impacts of COVID-19.

The report, jointly released by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF in 2021, warned that in sub-Saharan Africa, population growth, recurrent crises, extreme poverty and inadequate social protection measures have led to an additional 16.6 million children in child labour over the past four years. 

One of the key findings in the report included the state of the agriculture sector, which accounts for 70 percent of children in child labour (112 million), followed by 20 percent in services (31.4 million) and 10 percent in industry (16.5 million). The prevalence of child labour in rural areas (14 percent) is close to three times higher than in urban areas (5 percent).

Andrews Tagoe

In an exclusive interview given to IPS News, Andrews Tagoe, Board Member of the Global March Against Child Labour and the Deputy Secretary-General of the General Agricultural Workers Union, says child labour in Africa alone is more than the rest of the world combined. While the majority are in agriculture, other areas are equally very important.

“We have a big challenge at hand and Africa needs a lot of strategies to tackle it right away.

“Addressing child labour is not a benevolent issue, it is the right of the people in rural communities to have their children in school. Child labour free zones have proven and provided solutions. For example, the government of Ghana has adopted this method – a child labour free zone and child labour free community and friendly villages. However, this concept needs more investment to continue making improved participation of communities and structures to address the issue of child labour in the country,” Tagoe says.

The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index (CRI) report shows that the fifteen South African Development Community (SADC) member states lost about $80 billion in 2020 due to lower-than-expected growth, which is equivalent to around $220 for every SADC citizen.

“The analysis estimates that this economic crisis could take more than a decade to reverse, erasing all hope of countries meeting their national development plan targets to reduce poverty and inequality by 2030. The report says that many SADC member governments are still showing considerable commitment to fighting inequality – but still, nowhere near enough to offset the huge inequality produced by the market and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Among the key messages in the African Economic Outlook 2021 report, is that an estimated 51 million people on the continent could fall into poverty. “Today’s non-poor households, maybe tomorrow’s poor households, 50.2 percent of the people in Africa most vulnerable to staying in poverty live in East Africa.”

There is something that we are not doing well, if the number of child labour is so high, we must change our ways, says Tagoe.

“By working together, we have begun to see some way forward, but what we have seen is that in the allocation of resources, either not being sent to the right places or when they are not enough, that still remains a big challenge.”

“We are calling for huge, massive investments in the national plans of the country, we are also calling for a community-based approach – by working with Global March, agricultural unions and their grassroots organizations. It is important to note that it’s not just about the investment, but also about the allocation of the resources, enough money has been invested into fighting child labour, but where does that money go? How is it spent? These are important questions. More money needs to go into strategies that are working and looking into community development. We have been able to develop systems and strategies. We have been able to chart and map friendly villages and labour free zone, which shows what happens when proper investment is done, it creates the potential for child labour free communities and living.

“We want to address child labour in a way that it empowers the parents to take care of their own children, we want to address child labour in a way that it promotes improvement of community leaders, so they can pronounce their communities to be child labour free zones,” says Tagoe.

The ongoing 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour organised by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Durban, South Africa brings together experts from around the world who are leading the way in tackling child labour to reinvigorate international cooperation and to call for commitments that will genuinely realize freedom for every child.

Speaking during the conference’s opening plenary, Child Rights Advocate and 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Kailash Satyarthi urged rich nations to play their role in fighting the increasing global dilemma.

“You cannot blame Africa. It is happening because of the discriminatory world order. It is still the age-old racial discriminatory issue. We cannot end child labour without ending child labour in Africa. I refuse to accept that the world is so poor that it cannot eradicate the problem (of child labour),” Satyarthi said.

Child labour continues to be one of the worst end results of extreme poverty and inequality, children who are trapped in child labour deserve their right to education, health, clean water and sanitation.

“All of us must work together so that the prediction of these harrowing numbers doesn’t come true. We are very ashamed that the numbers are so high in Africa, and we must work hard to bring them down. All promises made to the children must be made to come true,” says Tagoe.

This is one of a series of stories that IPS will publish during the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour in Durban, South Africa.

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Excerpt:

A child beneficiary holding a drawing portraying domestic violence, at the Centre for Youth Empowerment and Civic Education, Lilongwe, Malawi which partnered with the ILO/IPEC to support the national action plan aimed at combating child labour. Credit: Marcel Crozet/ILO

By Joyce Chimbi
Nairobi, May 13 2022 (IPS)

Children washing clothes in rivers, begging on the streets, hawking, walking for kilometres in search of water and firewood, their tiny hands competing with older, experienced hands to pick coffee or tea, or as child soldiers are familiar sights in Africa and Asia.

Child rights experts at Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation reiterate that tolerance and normalisation of working children, many of whom work in hazardous conditions and circumstances, and apathy has stalled progress towards the elimination of child labour.

Further warnings include more children in labour across the sub-Saharan Africa region than the rest of the world combined. The continent now falls far behind the collective commitment to end all forms of child labour by 2025.

The International Labour Organization estimates more than 160 million children are in child labour globally.

How to achieve the Sustainable Development Target 8.7 and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour that focuses on its elimination by 2025 will be the subject of the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour to be held in Durban, South Africa, from May 15 to 20, 2022.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to open the conference. He will share the stage with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) chairperson and President of the Republic of Malawi Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder, and Argentina President Alberto Ángel Fernández Pérez (virtual).

“There are multiple drivers of child labour in Africa, and many of them are interconnected,” Minoru Ogasawara, Chief Technical Advisor for the Accelerating action for the elimination of child labour in supply chains in Africa (ACCEL Africa) at the International Labour Organization (ILO) tells IPS.

He speaks of the high prevalence of children working in agriculture, closely linked to poverty and family survival strategies.

Rapid population growth, Ogasawara says, has placed significant pressure on public budgets to maintain or increase the level of services required to fight child labour, such as education and social protection.

“Hence the call to substantially increase funding through official development assistance (ODA), national budgets and contributions from the private sector targeting child labour and its root causes,” he observes.

UNICEF says approximately 12 percent of children aged 5 to 14 years are involved in child labour – at the cost of their childhood, education, and future.

Of the 160 million child labourers worldwide, more than half are in sub-Saharan Africa, and 53 million are not in school – amounting to 28 % aged five to 11 and another 35 % aged 12 to 14, according to the most recent child labour global estimates by UNICEF and ILO.

Against this grim backdrop, keynote speakers Nobel Peace Laureates Kailash Satyarthi and Leymah Gbowee and former Prime Minister of Sweden Stefan Löfven will address the conference, which is expected to put into perspective how and why children still suffer some of the worst, most severe forms of child labour such as bonded labour, domestic servitude, child soldiers, drug trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation.

Satyarthi has been at the forefront of mobilising global support to this effect.

“I am working in collaboration with a number of other Nobel Laureates and world leaders. We are demanding the setting up of an international social protection mechanism. During the pandemic, we calculated that $53 billion annually could ensure social protection for all children in all low-income countries, as well as pregnant women too,” Satyarthi emphasises.

“Increased social protection, access to free quality education, health care, decent job opportunities for adults, and basic services together create an enabling environment that reduces household vulnerability to child labour,” Ogasawara stresses.

He points to an urgent need to introduce and or rapidly expand social security and other social protection measures suitable for the informal economy, such as cash transfers, school feeding, subsidies for direct education costs, and health care coverage.

The need for a school-to-work transition and to “target children from poor households, increase access to education while reducing the need to combine school with work among children below the minimum working age” should be highlighted.

In the absence of these social protection safety nets, the  International Labour Organization says it is estimated that an additional 9 million children are at risk of child labour by the end of this year and a possible further increase of 46 million child labourers.

In this context, the fifth global conference presents an opportunity to assess progress made towards achieving the goals of SDG Target 8.7, discuss good practices implemented by different actors around the world and identify gaps and urgent measures needed to accelerate the elimination of both child labour and forced labour.

The timing is crucial, says the ILO, as there are only three years left to achieve the goal of the elimination of all child labour by 2025 and only eight years towards the elimination of forced labour by 2030, as established by the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 8.7.

The conference will also see the active participation of young survivor-advocates from India and Africa. They will share their first-person accounts and lived experiences in sync with the core theme of the discussion.

The conference will also take place within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid fears and concerns that ending child labour became less significant on the international agenda as the world coped with the impact of the pandemic. This could reverse the many gains accrued in the fight against child labour, forced labour and child trafficking.

This is the first of a series of stories which IPS will be publishing during the 5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour from May 15 to 20, 2022.

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Musah Razark Adams, 13, (r) shows the sling shot that he uses to hit birds with when he works in a local rice field. Adams and his brother, Seidu, 15, (l) work to so that they can pay for school materials. A new report on child labour shows that global progress against child labour has ground to a halt and that a further 8.9 million children will be in child labour by the end of 2022 as a result of rising poverty driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DEHLI, Jun 10 2021 (IPS)

Malleshwar Rao, 27, spent his early years as a child labourer in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. Soon after finishing school at a local ashram, where the children of poor parents, sex workers and orphans studied, the 9-year-old would rush to a local construction site to join his parents who would be toiling in the harsh tropical sun to construct buildings as daily wage earners. The supervisor would assign Rao simpler tasks and his extra income would help his parents feed him and his younger brother.

“Those were really tough days,” recalls Rao, now an engineering graduate and an entrepreneur who also runs a non-profit `Don’t Waste Food’ to feed the needy.  “There was never enough food in the house. I used to study in the morning, then work as a labourer, go back home to do my homework and then get up early the next day to rush to school again. Life was blur; there was no time to play even,” Rao tells IPS.

At the beginning of 2020, 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million boys – like the 9-year-old Rao, were working everyday.

According to a global report by the United Nations Children’s Fund and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) released today, Jun. 10, the world is at a “critical juncture in the worldwide drive to stop child labour”, as the number of children in child labour has increased by 8.4 million children over the last four years.

“Global progress has ground to a halt over the last four years after slowing considerably in the four years before that. COVID-19 threatens to further erode past gains,” the report cautions.

New analysis suggests a further 8.9 million children will be in child labour by the end of 2022 as a result of rising poverty driven by the pandemic, the report states.

It also notes that while the global picture showed that while child labour in Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean was decreasing, progress in Sub-saharan Africa had “proven elusive” with child labour increasing.

In addition to working as construction labourer, Rao also took up random jobs at local eateries to earn 10 cents daily for three to four hours of work – dishwashing and organising groceries. “The added incentive was the leftover food which the eatery owner kindly gave to me. I’d eat some and bring the rest back for my family,” says Rao.

Former child labourer Malleshwar Rao was so affected by the hunger he felt as a child that he started his own charity to provide food for the poor. A new report shows that that involvement in child labour is higher for boys than girls. However, when girls’ household chores are included as child labour, the gap reduces. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

Rao’s story is a microcosm of the larger story of child labour in the world that shows that involvement in child labour is higher for boys than girls. However, when girls’ household chores are included as child labour, the gap reduces.

“Among all boys, 11.2 per cent are in child labour compared to 7.8 per cent of all girls. In absolute numbers, boys in child labour outnumber girls by 34 million. When the definition of child labour expands to include household chores for 21 hours or more each week, the gender gap in prevalence among boys and girls aged 5 to 14 is reduced by almost half,” today’s report notes.

The report also shows that more than one third of all children in child labour are excluded from school and that “hazardous child labour constitutes an even greater barrier to school attendance.”

“For every child in child labour who has reached a compulsory age for education but is excluded from school, another two struggle to balance the demands of school and work. They face compromises in education as a result and should not be forgotten in the discussion of child labour and education. Children who must combine child labour with schooling generally lag behind non-working peers in grade progression and learning achievement, and are more likely to drop out prematurely,” the report states.

Rao, however, was fortunate to have completed school. Thanks to the help of good Samaritans who paid his fees, Rao was able to turn his life around by graduating with an electronic engineering diploma from a local college.

He then got a job at a social media company as a content curator, earning $450 a month.

“My parents were thrilled that I was the first educated person in the family who also bagged a respectable job with a great salary,” Rao tells IPS. 

“My mother couldn’t stop crying for days. However, tackling hunger was always important for me, so simultaneously I also launched my NGO which collects extra food from nearby restaurants to feed the poor. Apart from reducing food wastage in hotels and at social gatherings, the initiative has also prevented thousands in the city from not sleeping hungry.”

He has since left his job and started his own travel startup.

But during the pandemic, apart from ration kits, Rao has also been providing oxygen cylinders and cooked meals for those in quarantine. India has reported nearly 30 million COVID-19 cases and upwards of 350,000 deaths since the pandemic’s second wave began in March.

“I have 30 volunteers from the local community engaged in distributing food and helping people get in touch with blood donors as well hospitals who have COVID beds. Through our network, we’ve been able to provide groceries for around 70,000 families within this lockdown period  since March,” says Rao.

The money is raised through crowdsourcing on social media and through individual donors. The NGO has also started supplying masks and sanitary pads for construction workers. His volunteers have also helped cremate 180 dead bodies of deceased who were shunned by families for fear of catching COVID-19.

Having known what it is like to be hungry and struggle for a square meal, Rao says he often encounters poor children during his donation drives who remind him of his past.

According to the ILO, there are around 12.9 million Indian children engaged in work between the ages of 7 to 17 years old, the majority who are between 12 and 17 years old, who work up to 16 hours a day to help their families make ends meet. An estimated 10.1 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 years old are engaged in work, says the organisation.

Much of the problem lies in tardy implementation of laws, say activists. According to Dr. Ranjana Kumari, Director, Centre for Social Research, a Delhi based think tank, even though India has strict laws against child labour, they are full of loopholes which allow poor families and unscrupulous agents to circumvent them and exploit the children. 

“These poor kids work in hazardous industries like brick making, quarries, tobacco industry and glass making which not only puts an end to their education but also makes them vulnerable to prostitution and trafficking at a very young age. The implementation of the laws needs to be stricter,” says Kumari.    

The report calls for extending social protection to mitigate poverty and economic uncertainty which underlie child labour.

It also calls for, among others:

• an evidenced-based policy roadmap;
• for every child to be registered at birth, which would allow them to access social services;
• the expansion of decent work; and
• free, good quality schooling which can “provide a viable alternative and open doors to a better future”.

Meanwhile, Rao’s story shows that with education, former child labourers can lead better lives. He has been recognised by local personalities and was also mentioned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his monthly radio talk show ‘Mann ki Baat’ (Heart to heart talk).  Rao has also received awards from local communities and organisations for his work.

“The pandemic has brought out the worst and the best in people. I’m now on lifelong mission to ensure that nobody goes hungry. My new startup isn’t yet profitable, but I’m earning enough to feed my family and also take care of the needy,” he says.

** Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Bonn, Germany

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

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Selimatha Salifu, a former child labourer from Ghana, is now a teacher working with children and encouraging them to continue their education. Salifu is one of two former child activists who addressed United Nations officials, business, faith, union, education and youth leaders from around the world at the virtual launch of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ campaign on Jan. 21.

By Alison Kentish
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 22 2021 (IPS)

Selimatha Salifu of Ghana is a former child labourer who has vowed to do her part to bring attention to the plight of the world’s over 150 million child labourers. Raised in a fishing community, she recalls her days buying fish to sell, working from daybreak till nightfall to contribute to her family. She credits the General Agriculture Workers Union for rescuing her and ensuring she enrolled in school.

“I’m a teacher by profession now and I work with kids. I want to appeal to children going through the same thing. I was once like them. I want to tell them that they shouldn’t lose their youth and they can have hope that they’ll come out of this successfully. They won’t be on the streets forever. They will not be at the riverside day in day out to put something on the table for their families.”

Salifu is one of two former child activists who addressed United Nations officials, business, faith, union, education and youth leaders from around the world at the virtual launch of the ‘Fair Share to End Child Labour’ campaign on Jan. 21.

The initiative is organised by Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi, founder of the Global March to End Child Labour and decades-long child rights advocate. It demands a fair share of resources, policies and social protection for children, in order to end child labour. The campaign was launched on the same day the United Nations officially declared 2021 as the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour.

“We have seen that the injustices, inequalities, miseries, denial of education, child labour, sexual exploitation of children, trafficking and so many other problems have been exacerbated during the pandemic, but these injustices were already there,” the Laureate said. “When we call for a fair share, we are calling for creating a new culture of justice and equality.”

The most recent report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) stated that the challenge of ending child labour ‘remains formidable.’  While almost 100 million children have been saved in the last two decades, 64 million girls and 88 million boys are in child labour globally – almost 1 in 10 of all children. Director General Guy Ryder said the fair share campaign ‘goes to the heart’ of the ILO’s social justice mandate and complements ongoing efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 8.7, which targets the elimination of child labour by 2025.

“We all know that the fight against child labour is complex, the causes of child labour are complex and through this Fair Share campaign, I am convinced that we are doing something very important.”

Director General of the World Health Organisation Dr. Tedros Adhanom reminded the partners that the social and economic shocks wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic point to 66 million children falling into extreme poverty. This is in addition to the estimated 386 million children already in that bracket. He said a campaign like this will help maintain pressure on international organisations and other partners to keep their promises to the world’s children.

“The most disadvantaged children are the most affected, with no access to social and legal protection, leaving them vulnerable to social exclusion and exploitation including child labour. We cannot allow this to happen. We must ensure that these children and their families have their fair share of resources and social protection,” he said.

The Campaign’s Nobel Laureate leader has applauded the young people from around the world who have answered the call to action and are dedicating the time to ridding the world of child labour. The Youth Voice was prominent in Satyarthi’s 2020 100 Million campaign – over 100 young people demanded that world leaders guarantee a fair share of pandemic recovery funds gets to marginalised populations. The youth leaders have confirmed their support for the new initiative.

“We are committing to use our convening power to mobilise our constituents to reach out to their members of Parliament, to their Senators, to their Prime Ministers, to their Presidents, to allocate a fair share of the national resources to end child labour.  I call on everyone, especially young people and students, to join this campaign in whatever small way.  We should not rest until every child is free, safe and educated,” said Peter Kwasi, Secretary General of the All-Africa Student Union.

Other partners at the campaign launch included the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). With former child workers and youth on the frontline and the backing of leaders and international institutions, the campaign is hoping that its demands will see 2021 as a turning point in the history of the movement to end child labour.

Excerpt:

Trafficking survivor Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh, had to begin working at age 12 to help pay off the two loans his father had taken out. Credit: Rina Mukherji/IPS

By Rina Mukherji
PUNE, India, Sep 22 2020 (IPS)

One of the worst fallouts of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the closure of industries in India, which caused thousands of migrant labourers to return home to villages in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal. In a region where the poorest have always been subjected to bonded labour, child labour and slave trafficking, it has meant revisiting the past.

“Uttar Pradesh has seen 35 lakh [3.5 million] workers return home. Azamgarh district alone has seen 1.65 lakh [165,000] returnees. Of these, only 10,000 people could be given employment under MNREGA [Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act],” activist and Rural Organisation for Social Advancement chief functionary, Mushtaque Ahmed, told IPS

• MNREGA guarantees 100 days of wage employment to a rural household where the adults are willing to undertake unskilled labour.

Of late, as the country has progressed into a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions, and some workers — who comprised the bulk of the skilled labour in industrial belts — have returned to work.

Bonded labour – formally illegal but still continues

Bonded labour formally ended in India with the passing of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.

• The  Act seeks to end forced labour in all its forms, and is supported by other legislation, namely the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Contract Labour ( Regulation & Abolition) Act, 1970, and the Inter-State Migrant Workmen ( Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service ) Act, 1979.

But in the underdeveloped districts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where feudal lords exploited the lower castes and had them work for free on their lands in the past, it continues to exist in invisible forms, drawing sustenance from within the casteist social structure that has confined Dalits and Mahadalits to illiteracy and grinding poverty. 

The Mahadalits, are especially vulnerable, with their abjectly low literacy of 9 percent, as compared to the Dalit literacy level of 28 percent. First-generation learners for the most part, the Dalits and Mahadalits are generally unable to access government schemes that guarantee a better future. Often, the inability to pay back a small loan of Rs 5,000 ($68) or Rs 2,000 ($27) sees entire families being bound into slave or bonded labour in brick kilns, or farms owned by the person they are indebted to for generations.

Children also at risk

At times, families are forced to pledge a minor child to work for an unscrupulous trafficker, according to the Freedom Fund. 

The health infrastructure in eastern Uttar Pradesh and in Bihar districts along the Nepal border has always been wanting.

While the COVID-19 pandemic may have worsened the situation but matters become compounded as many villages in Bihar faced the fury of unprecedented floods last month, which saw almost 8.4 million people affected.  Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) centres in Bihar have collapsed, with the unprecedented floods straining them to the hilt.

• The ICDS  is a nationwide government programme under which children under six and their mothers are cared for through nutrition, education, immunisation, health checkup and referral services. The programme has managed to stem anaemia and other health problems mothers face in underprivileged, rural communities all over India.

Children are more at risk because of the current circumstances than previously.

Human trafficking for slave or bonded labour may either see a child being sent to a place thousands of kilometres away from home, or across the border into Nepal. Within India, the modus operandi involves sending children from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Bengal to a southern state where unfamiliarity with the local language prevents the child labourer from escaping or negotiating a way out and returning home.

With so few options, parents are sometimes lured with a lump sum of Rs 5,000 ($68) to Rs. 10,000 ($136) paid in advance, as Manav Sansadhan Evam Mahila Vikas Sansthan ( MSEMVS) executive director Dr. Bhanuja Sharan Lal told IPS. MSEMVS is an NGO that focuses on the eradication of child labour.

No option but to make children work

But the stories many of the survivors have to relate are harsh.

Wage labourer Umesh Mari from Mayurba village in Sitamarhi district in Bihar, had to take a loan of Rs 300,000 ($4,080) for his wife’s medical treatment.

Since Sitamarhi lacks healthcare facilities needed for serious medical problems, the family had to admit her to a hospital in the adjoining district of Muzaffarpur.

Unable to repay the loan, the family, comprising of four children and son-in-law, had no option but to look for additional, better-paying jobs.

It is how 13-year-old Ramavatar and his brother-in-law Kesari were recruited for a tile fitting job across the border, in Malangwa in neighbouring Nepal. The job promised a wage of Rs 300 ($4) per day. Once there, they found that the conditions entailed working from 9 am until 7 pm with just a half-hour break. It was bonded labour.

There was little food, and erratic or no payment for months. The recent COVID-19 lockdown helped Ramavtar escape and return to his village, as IPS found. However, the family remains worried on account of their unpaid loan. Chances are, Ramavatar may find it hard to resist the trafficking mafiosi, and may have to return to an enslaved existence in bonded labour in another factory once again.

Take the case of Devendra Kumar Mulayam, who hails from Shahapur in the Chandouli district of Uttar Pradesh. The second among five siblings of a landless Dalit family, Mulayam  told IPS how the family became desperate for a source of income following two loans that his father had to take — one was for the marriage of his elder sister marriage and second following an accident that resulted in this elder sister sustaining a sever head injury, which occurred after her wedding.

As the eldest son in the family, 12-year-old Mulayam had to drop out of school and start looking for a job, while his younger siblings had to forgo their education.

Courtesy of a recruiter, Mulayam soon found his way to a textile factory in Coimbatore, where he was hired as a loader, at Rs 150 ($2) per day in 2010.

He was made to work for 12-15 hours each day, and the payments were erratic. Worse still, he had to pay for his own treatment wherever he was injured during work. 

Mulayam and his fellow-workers remained closely guarded and were never allowed to move away from either their workplace or living quarters.

Any breach of “discipline” or error at work invited severe beatings. In 2011, when things became unbearable, Mulayam and 18 other fellow workers decided to protest. Theirs was one of the worst forms of bonded labour.

Recounting the horror, Mulayam told IPS, “We were heavily assaulted, and thrown out. Scared of being rounded up by the police and sent back to the clutches of our tormentors, we kept hiding in the forested tracts adjoining the town, for five days. Thankfully, I could manage to tell my family members back home of my plight. They sought the help of a local NGO, which managed to secure my release and arrange for my  return.”

Despite the pandemic, children are still being bonded.

“We recently rescued nine children from Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh who were trafficked to a panipuri [an Indian snack]   factory in Telangana after their parents were paid an advance of Rs 10,000 each.  Once there, they were made to work from 2 am every morning to 4 pm in the evening. They were only given their meals, and had to work for free. Similar circumstances had driven eight children from Azamgarh (in Uttar Pradesh) to a textile factory in Gujarat where they were used as slave labour,” Lal told IPS.

• This is the first in a two-part series on bonded labour in India. Next week IPS will look at the government initiatives and impediments  in overcoming the problem.

This is part of a series of features from across the globe on human trafficking. IPS coverage is supported by the Airways Aviation Group.

The Global Sustainability Network ( GSN ) is pursuing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 8 with a special emphasis on Goal 8.7 which ‘takes immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms’.

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalisation of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) says 99 percent of the 4.8 million victims of commercial sexual exploitation in 2016 were women and girls, with one in five being children. This young girl pictured here from Nigeria has never been to school and has marks from flogging over her hand. She lives with the person for whom she sells rice for and does not know her age. Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi said today that considering that most of the $ 8 trillion raised for the COVID-19 Response Fund went to bail out big companies, governments should seize the opportunity to hold them accountable and make sure that no child labour is involved in the supply chain. Credit: Tobore Ovuorie and Yemisi Onadipe/IPS

By Mantoe Phakathi
MBABANE, Sep 9 2020 (IPS)

The COVID-19 pandemic should give governments across the world an opportunity to hold corporates accountable against child labour. Kailash Satyarthi, the 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate, made this submission at the virtual 3rd Fair Share for Children Summit.

The two-day summit which started today and was facilitated by the Laureates for Leaders and Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation – both of which were founded by Satyarthi – brought together several laureates and child rights leaders.

Satyarthi said considering that most of the $ 8 trillion raised for the COVID-19 Response Fund went to bail out big companies, governments should seize the opportunity to hold them accountable and make sure that no child labour is involved in the supply chain.

“That should be the responsibility of the governments who have put a lot of money in bailing out those companies,” said Satyarthi, adding that 20 percent of the COVID-19 funds should go to the marginalised. Earlier in the day, he said it was unacceptable that a mere 0.013 percent of COVID response money had been allocated to the most vulnerable.

He said it is also the responsibility of the companies to ensure that no child labour is involved in the supply chain. As a result, he called for laws at national and international levels to ensure that due diligence is made in the supply chain by the companies.

Satyarthi further urged the youth to take the lead in championing the eradication of child labour in the world.

“I’m happy that in many places in the world through the 100 Million Campaign, young people are raising their voices and ready to fight the menace of child labour, illiteracy and poverty of children,” he said.

Kailash Satyarthi, the 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate, said that 20 percent of the COVID-19 funds should go to the marginalised. Earlier in the day, he said it was unacceptable that a mere 0.013 percent of COVID response money had been allocated to the most vulnerable. Courtesy: Laureates for Leaders

One such young person is Lalita, a youth parliamentarian and former child labourer from India, who demonstrated how she and her friends have been leading the way in convincing parents to withdraw their children from work. Through their door-to-door activism in her community, the youth was also spreading awareness about the importance of education.

“A lot has changed since then in the village,” the teenager told delegates through an interpreter.

She said authorities supported all out-of-school children and those withdrawn from work to return to school. As representatives of the youth in her village, she said they raised their concerns about child labour and discrimination against poor children to authorities. 

“We fought against this, and we won,” she told delegates.

During the pandemic, Lalita and her peers wrote letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal seeking support to mount a big TV screen for underprivileged children who had no access to online learning. They also made and distributed masks to children and adults of her village while creating awareness about COVID-19 to protect them from the virus.

“I’m a 16-year-old from an underprivileged community, and I’ve been working relentlessly towards the protection of children towards the pandemic,” she told delegates, adding: “But despite being a part of the government and the private sector, you’re all not using your privilege and power to the advantage of marginalised children.” 

Lalita, a youth parliamentarian and former child labourer from India, demonstrated how she and her friends have been leading the way in convincing parents to withdraw their children from work. Courtesy: Laureates for Leaders

Lalita was not only speaking on behalf of the children in her village, but she was raising her voice in support of the 152 million child labourers, of which 73 million are in the worst forms of child labour, across the world. In fact, with COVID-19, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) projects that the situation will worsen although child labour has been reduced by a third since the beginning of the century.

According to ILO director-general Guy Ryder, COVID-19 will, in all likelihood, lead to an increase in the numbers of child labour in the world 

“It’s not difficult to understand why this is happening,” said Ryder. “We know that with the loss of jobs and livelihoods, extreme poverty is spreading around different parts of the world.”

He said with 2 billion workers in the informal economy and 1.6 billion of them facing a destruction of their livelihoods, inadequate social protection and closing of schools, more children could be driven into child labour. 

“But this is not a situation that we should regard as a fatality; something that we can do nothing about,” he said, adding: “What we do now in rebuilding from COVID-19 will have a long-lasting effect on the future trajectory of child labour.”

This is a possibility because the private sector has also come to the party. Roberto Suarez Santos, the secretary-general of the International Organization of Employers, said, despite the devastating impact COVID-19 has had on the private sector, the people on the margins of society have suffered immensely.

While he said it is worrying that more children could be forced to labour as a result of the pandemic, he called on delegates to ensure that progress is not reversed.

“The ratification of the ILO Convention 182 is not a minor thing,” said Santos. “It’s a historic moment, but implementation is important despite the promise.”

He accepted that due diligence on supply chains should be strengthened, but he was quick to add that the focus should be on the entire economy because child labour also takes place in domestic contexts.

“The vast majority of child labour are not in the supply chain, which I want to insist are critical, but are also domestic. In North Africa, for instance, most of the child labour takes place in domestic contexts,” he said.

The Indian Minister of Women and Child Development Smriti Irani, spoke about how her government provided a safety net for children and their families during the pandemic.

Martin Chungong, the secretary-general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), called on parliamentarians across the world to effectively play their role in ratifying international laws and robust budgetary functions.

Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi said that without prioritising children we could lose an entire generation as evidence mounts that the number of child labourers, child marriages, school dropouts and child slaves has increased as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe. Courtesy: Kailash Satyarthi Children's Foundation

By Stella Paul
HYDERABAD, India, Sep 8 2020 (IPS)

Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi warns of the danger that over one million children could die, not because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but because of the economic crisis facing their families.

In an exclusive interview with IPS, Satyarthi said that without prioritising children we could lose an entire generation as evidence mounts that the number of child labourers, child marriages, school dropouts and child slaves has increased as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe.

He candidly noted that the most marginalised and vulnerable children in the world are still not prioritised by governments and policies and that the political will and urgency of action was simply not there to offer them protection.

Satyarthi is undoubtedly one of the greatest child rights’ crusaders of our time. Founder of Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) – India’s largest movement for the protection of children and centred around ending bonded and labour and human trafficking, Satyarthi has been relentlessly working to protect the rights of children for over four decades. Save Childhood Movement has rescued almost 100,000 children from servitude and bonded labour, re-integrating them into society and aiding them in resuming their education.

IPS interviews Satyarthi on the eve of Fair Share for Children Summit, a global virtual conference, hosted by Laureates and Leaders for Children – also founded by Satyarthi. The summit, which takes place from Sept. 9-10, brings together Nobel laureates, including the Dalai Lama, Tawakkol Karman, Professor Jody Williams and leading international figures and heads of United Nations agencies to demand a fair share for the world’s most marginalised children during and beyond COVID-19.

The pandemic has gravely endangered millions of children around the globe, and it is not just a moral obligation but also a practical step to protect these children, Satyarthi says.

He also elaborates what could be a fair share of the global pandemic recovery package for the children and how this could be managed. Excerpts follow:

IPS: Where does the world stand today in ensuring child rights? Which are the areas where we have clear progress, and where are we still failing?

Kailash Satyarthi (KS): I would be very blunt to say that the most marginalised and vulnerable children in the world are still not prioritised in the policies and fund allocations and spending on them. Protection of children needs a lot of political will and a lot of urgency and action which was not there. But I would agree that we have been making progress, slowly but surely, we are trying to protect our children in different areas. There is clear evidence that the number of child labourers has decreased over the last 20 years or so, the number of out-of-school children has also dropped considerably. Similarly, we made progress in the field of malnutrition. So, there were many areas we made progress. But as I said before, we require a tremendous amount of political will and action to protect our children.

IPS: How has the COVID pandemic endangered lives of children across the world?

KS: Well, before the pandemic, we had several problems in relation to safety, education, health and freedom of children. And since these children belong to the most marginalised sector of society – they are children of unorganised workers, peasants, farmers, they are children of indigenous peoples and children belonging to refugee communities. So, they were already suffering, injustice was there, inequality was there, but COVID-19 has exacerbated that inequality and injustice, and we see the worst effect is on children.

Though there is no direct infection or disease, the indirect effect is alarming, and that has to be addressed now. It is very clear that if we do not take urgent action now, then we risk losing the entire generation. It is evident and eminent from all sources that the number of child labourers, the number of child marriages, school dropouts, the number of child slaves, even children engaged in petty crimes – these will increase.

So, we have to underline these factors which are impacting the lives of children and their families, of course. And we have to be extremely vigilant and active about it. So, that sense of moral responsibility and political responsibility should be generated and educated.

I also think that this crisis is the crisis of civilisations. We were thinking that since everybody is facing the same problem, the pandemic would be an equaliser. But instead of being an equaliser, it has become a divider. Divisive forces are quite active in society, and equality and injustice are growing in the children. So, first of all, as an individual and a concerned citizen, one should generate compassion.

Two Tamil refugee children play in Mannar in northern Sri Lanka. The COVID-19 pandemic has gravely endangered millions of children around the globe. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

IPS: The government stimulus package is expected to provide employment and help in economic recovery. Is it feasible to use this specifically for child development and child protection?

KS: It is not only feasible, it is necessary. We cannot protect humanity and ethos of equality and justice until and unless we address the problems of the most marginalised children and people of the world.

I am quite supportive of the government stimulus package, which is $9 trillion so far. I will give you an example – the stimulus is prioritised to bail out their own companies. Most of the developed countries are putting up stimulus to bail out their own economy, their banks, financial institutions and companies. In the United States, some companies have all-time high stock market situations.

On the other hand, we have a danger that over a million children will die – not because of COVID-19 pandemic, but because of the economic crisis, their parents are facing. So, this is injustice. How can you justify this? You need a stimulation package to bailout [the] economy, but you need a stimulation package to ensure that our children are protected. So, this is not just a moral question but also a very practical issue.

This is why in May earlier this year, I joined 88 Nobel Laureates and global leaders to sign a joint statement demanding that 20 percent of the COVID-19 response be allocated to the most marginalised children and their families. This is the minimum fair share for children.

IPS:  The theme of the summit is #FairShare4Children. What would be considered a fair share of the estimated $9 trillion set aside globally to mitigate the effects of the pandemic? Where are the most critical areas? And how should it be managed?

KS: Even if you only look at the $5 trillion packages announced in the first few weeks of the pandemic, 20 precent of that is $1 trillion – enough funding to fund all the COVID-19 U.N. appeals, cancel two years of debt for low-income countries, provide the external funding required for two years of the Sustainable Development Goals on Education and Water and Sanitation and a full ten years of the external funding for the health-related SDGs.

Within the estimated $9 trillion of governments’ aid, this would mean $1 trillion (for children). This funding would mitigate the increase child hunger and food insecurity, tackle the increase in child labour and slavery, the denial of education and the heightened vulnerability of children on the move such as child refugees and displaced children. These are the areas of immediate criticality. 

Some key demands to this end include – for one, the declaration of COVID vaccines as a global common good so that it is made available for free for the most marginalised communities. Secondly, the creation of a Global Social Protection Fund to provide a financial safety net to the poorest communities in lower and lower-middle income countries. Thirdly, all governments should cancel the debt of poor countries to allow them to redirect funds towards social protection. Lastly, governments should establish legislation to ensure due diligence and transparency for business and ensure its strict compliance to prevent the engagement of child labour and slavery in the global supply chains.

If we can prevent the devastating impact of COVID-19 on these areas in the present, if we can reduce the inequality in the world’s COVID-19 response, if we ensure the most vulnerable receive their Fair Share to we can then be in a position to salvage the future of our children.

Excerpt:

A 2009 study found that almost 250,000 children worked in auto repair stores, brick klins, as domestic labourers, and as carpet weavers and sozni embroiderers in Jammu and Kashmir. Credit: Umer Asif/IPS 

By Umar Manzoor Shah
 SRINAGAR, India-administered Jammu and Kashmir, May 9 2019 (IPS)

Mubeen Ahmad was nine years old when his mother sold him into service to a mechanic for the petty sum of few thousand Indian rupees. His mother had found it hard to support the family after his father, a labourer, was killed during one of the anti-India protests in Jammu and Kashmir in 2008.

So Ahmad learnt how to repair deflated tyres and erratic car engines instead of attending school. “I was made to work amid the freezing cold during winters and there was no one to whom I could have narrated my ordeal,” the 20-year-old, who now owns a shop in Srinagar, the state’s capital, tells IPS.

Rights activist Aijaz Mir tells IPS that children like Ahmad can be found on almost every street in Kashmir as a majority of homes here have lost their sole bread winners because of the ongoing conflict in the region.

Jammu and Kashmir, a northern Indian state known for its picturesque tourist resorts and majestic mountains, has long been embroiled in a violent secessionist movement.
The seven-decade dispute over Kashmir has become a humanitarian nightmare. It is the cause of wars and conflicts between nuclear rivals Pakistan and India, and remains the reason for an ongoing armed rebellion against New Delhi’s rule.

The Kashmir dispute is the oldest unresolved disagreement on the United Nation’s agenda.
Over the last 30 years, an estimated 100,000 people—including civilians, militants, and army personnel— have died in the region as the armed struggle for freedom from Indian rule continues.

“Nobody talks about this dark and dreadful side of the conflict which is consuming our children in hordes. We have found that the families of the victims too don’t want to send them to school because there is no one who could earn at their dwellings,” Mir tells IPS.

In 2018 alone there were 614 incidents of violence in the state, resulting in the deaths of 257 militants, 91 security forces and 38 civilians.

Both India and Pakistan have gone to war over the territory twice, in 1947 and 1965, and fought a smaller-scale conflict in 1999 and again in February when a Kashmiri militant rammed an explosive-laden vehicle into a convoy of Indian paramilitary forces, killing at least 40 soldiers in the worst attack in the region in three decades.

As recently as Monday, May 6, violence disrupted the ongoing elections as militants hurled grenades at polling stations in the southern part of the state.

Violence and death are a part of life here, but children are the silent sufferers in this bloody conflict.

On the outskirts of Srinagar, 13-year-old Shaista Akhtar is busy weaving designs on a traditional rug. It is 9 am and she will not be stopping her work to leave for school anytime soon.

Five years ago, Akhtar was was studying in grade 3 when her father—a carpenter by profession—was caught up in an attack by Islamist militants. It was the day her life changed.

The grenade that was meant for the army continent had missed its target, landing instead on the road Akhtar’s father was travelling on. He, and two others, died on the scene.

The death of her father is faintly imprinted in her mind and all she remembers of the time are the wails of her mother and two elder sisters.
After his death, her two elder sisters decided to quit their studies and began to work like their mother in order to support the family.

Akhtar was sent to a local weaver who taught her how create the tapestries unique to Kashmir’s colourful, traditional rugs and shawls. Two years later, by the time Akhtar was 10, she had learnt her trade.

“I earn almost INR 3500 [50 dollars] every month. The only satisfaction I derive out of my work is that I help my family to sustain. Otherwise, I yearn to go to the school, study sciences and mathematics along with other kids there,” she tells IPS.

But Akhtar’s story is not unique.
According to government figures, there are over 175,000 children actively involved in child labour in the state, which has a population of 12 million.

Mir says the actual number of child working could be much higher as government figures only reveal the reported cases and a majority of the child labour cases go unreported due to the fear of punishment.

An independent report titled “Socio Economic and Ethical dimensions of Child Labour in Kashmir” conducted in 2005 by Professor Fayaz Ahmad claimed that at the time there were more than 250,000 children in the state working in auto repair shops, brick klins, as domestic labourers, and as carpet weavers and sozni embroiderers.

One of the prime reasons for child labour was poverty, the report stated.

A 2009 study conducted by the Department of Sociology, University of Kashmir, reveals that about 66 percent of child labourers have only studied until the eighth grade. It further states that 9.2 percent of child labourers are between five and 10 years old, while 90 percent of them are between 11 and 14 years old.

The study also points out that once children start earning money, 80 percent of them stop attending school.

Inam-ul- Haq, 13, is one of those children who had to stop attending school to earn an income. He works as a helper at a roadside eatery in southern Kashmir, earning no more than 1500 INR (21 dollars) a month.

He began working to support his younger brother and bed-ridden, diabetic mother after his father died in the 2016 street protests. More than 90 civilians were killed during the six-month, anti-India protests.

“My mother is diabetic and younger brother a five year old kid. Who could have earned for them if not me?” Haq tells IPS, adding that even if his earnings are meagre, he is content that his family doesn’t starve or go to bed hungry.

In Kashmir, the 1986 Child Labour Act bans the employment of children below the age of 14. But according to Zahid Mushtaq, an editor at the local Srinagar newspaper, it is very rare that culprits are brought to book.

“The reason is simple. Family of the child and the child himself doesn’t testify in the court that he is working anywhere. In most of the cases, the victim is so poverty stricken that officials do not initiate action against the accused as it could cost the child his job,” Mushtaq says.

Mushatq also blames the lack of rehabilitation centres and failed government policies as being among the reasons for the spiralling number of cases of child labour here.  According to Mushatq, victims of violence are eligible for government’s financial assistance but the incredibly slow processing of these cases means that they gather dust as the victims suffer further.

For Akhtar, she knows that studying is the key to a good life. A life where she will be respected.

“I dream of becoming a teacher and teach kids English. As I am not studying at present, my life would remain as it is. There will be nothing good the world would offer to me.”

So instead she prays “that some help may descend from the heavens so that I wouldn’t have to earn and can go to school.”

The origins of the GSN come from the endeavours of the Joint Declaration of Religious Leaders signed on 2 December 2014. Religious leaders of various faiths, gathered to work together “to defend the dignity and freedom of the human being against the extreme forms of the globalization of indifference, such us exploitation, forced labour, prostitution, human trafficking” and so forth.

Excerpt:

The brick site where children toil away, just down the road from the classroom. Credit: Andrea Vale/IPS

By Andrea Vale
LIMA, Jun 28 2018 (IPS)

Most laborers in Peru are forced into a vicious cycle by circumstance. Faced with low-paying, high-intensity work, they have no choice but to make their children work as well. Having spent their lives neglecting education for labor, those children in turn grow up with no options for income besides low-paying, high-intensity positions  – and so on. But in classrooms across one region, a handful of teachers are trying to break that cycle while the children are still young.

Passing out books every week in a tiny classroom that lies on the side of a dirt road, high up in the Andes overlooking the city of Cajamarca, volunteers are met with a crime that teachers would usually welcome – the children are trying to sneak out extra books so that they can read more.When they first begin coming to classes, virtually all of the children have self-esteem so low that they are cripplingly shy and can barely speak to others.

Once each has a book the air is filled with high voices while they excitedly compare with one another, sometimes swapping between friends, exclaiming in thrill.

Each one of them is a child laborer.

The overwhelming majority work in brick yards, although some in nearby towns work loading and unloading carts of fruit from trucks in the crowded mercado; as construction workers helping to build houses by carrying cement and heavy tools; farm hands; maids; or simply wandering the streets for hours picking up bottles for recycling departments.

The miniature brick workers – all aged around six years old – rise at six in the morning and walk for several hours to get to their work sites. They spend all day in the mud, molding dirt into bricks; carrying loads into large, industrial ovens; hauling piles of finished bricks into trucks; and unloading the same loads in construction sites and crowded mercados.

It’s a job that consumes a child’s daily life, taking up any time that he or she is not in school.  The work gradually eats in to school hours themselves more and more until the children eventually drop out completely around age 12, to allow themselves to spend more time working and earn a larger income. Unsurprisingly, almost all of them are constantly ill and malnourished.

The first week spent in the classroom, one volunteer picked up an unsuspecting-looking crossword puzzle and examined it off-handedly. What she found was a startling unintentional statement on the reality of child labor, a first-grader’s scrawl answering as casual vocab terms the names of laws and legal rights that ensured that his right to protect his body, and for adults to care for him and other children.

That disquieting intermingling of childish innocence alongside more menacing undertones characterized the classroom. Posters on the wall displayed ‘My Rights Are: A Family;” “My Rights Are: An Education;” and “My Rights Are: A Home,” with the same bright colors and cartoons that exhibited the ABCs in elementary school classrooms.

A child laborer’s crossword puzzle. Credit: Andrea Vale/IPS

Antonieta, the teacher, smiled over them all from her place at the front of the classroom. She augmented to the atmosphere of cheeriness, taking time to sit with the children at their tables to ask them, “What story are you writing in your journal?”; “What do you think the moral of the book you’re reading is?”

When interviewed sitting on a log by the outhouse behind the classroom without any children around, however, her demeanor is notably more sober.

“Going to school is the most expensive right in Peru,” Antonieta said in Spanish, “According to the laws, they say, ‘No, school doesn’t cost anything,’ but in reality, they ask for money for everything.”

Antonieta told me that child laborers come from illiterate parents, ones without stable jobs. At best, mothers find occasional work as housekeepers, clothes washers and nannies, earning a salary of 100 soles a month (30 dollars), 200 if they’re lucky. Fathers are blue-collar workers, resigned by their lack of education to low salaries and career instability.

To earn an income even close to what it takes to keep a family surviving, everyone has to work – including the smallest members. An average income for a family in which mothers, fathers and children all contribute is about 400 to 600 soles a month – the equivalent of about 120 to 180 U.S. dollars.

And what does 400 to 600 soles a month look like? A house comprised of one room, at most two. Mothers, fathers, children, aunts and uncles, and grandparents all live together in their simultaneous bedroom, dining room and kitchen. And housed inside with them are farm animals and pets. As a result, these children grow up without independence, constantly stricken with stomach infections, colds and other detrimental diseases. The Cajamarca region holds the second-most place in Peru for youth malnourishment.

According to the International Labor Organization, there are 3.3 million child laborers in Peru, and a third of them are under 12 years old. 26.5% – almost 1/3 – of the Peruvian population between the ages of six and 17 are currently working, and those numbers are projected to increase greatly over the next few years. Though most of the younger half of child laborers attempts to attend school alongside their labor, children seem to drop out of school completely around age 12. For instance, among children who labor as domestic workers, only 2.3% of those aged 6-11 don’t attend school at all – as compared to 97.7% of those aged 12-17.

One brick site sits just down the road from the classroom. Unshielded from the sharp Peruvian sun beating down is a field of meticulously organized piles of industrial-sized bricks, intercepted in places by mounds of dirt and one massive brick oven. It isn’t hard to picture the ghosts of activity that had filled it only hours before – little hands straightening those piles of bricks; tiny bodies stumbling inside that oven carrying loads of mud stacked higher than their heads.

“Last week we gave dolls to the children,” Antonieta said. “They identify certain parts of the body where emotion is connected, where they feel happy or sad. Many of them couldn’t.”

When they first begin coming to classes, virtually all of the children have self-esteem so low that they are cripplingly shy and can barely speak to others. They are totally unable and fearful of expressing their thoughts and feelings.

“The children don’t have places for recreation. They don’t have places to be together with their friends, they don’t have places to do homework, they don’t have places to have conversations with their parents,” Antonieta said, “After coming to a few classes, they are more expressive. They are able to communicate their feelings, they communicate more with their families. They are improving in their studies. We have them write in journals. There was a little boy who brought his in and had written, ‘If (class) didn’t exist anymore, my dreams would be broken. My dreams would be dead.’ “

Antonieta began to quietly weep.

“A lot of children have written very good things, beautiful things,” she persisted, “‘There is so much hope with these children, that they’ll be able to learn and grow, and they come here and they get that hope.”

She says that reading “will help tremendously with their knowledge, increase their abilities, and they will not be taken advantage of so easily. They will be able to defend their own rights.”

Antonieta says that of the 250 children enrolled this year, 200 have left work, and the rest have reduced their hours at work.

“There is still a lot of work to do,” Antonieta says. “We’ve made progress, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”

A little girl peels manioc to make flour in Acará, in the state of Pará, in the northeast of Brazil's Amazon region. In the rural sectors of Brazil, it is a deeply-rooted custom for children to help with family farming, on the grounds of passing on knowledge. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2018 (IPS)

Child labour has been substantially reduced in Latin America, but 5.7 million children below the legal minimum age are still working and a large proportion of them work in precarious, high-risk conditions or are unpaid, which constitute new forms of slave labour.

For the International Labor Organisation (ILO) child labour includes children working before they reach the minimum legal age or carrying out work that should be prohibited, according to Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, in force since 2000.

The vast majority of these children work in agriculture, but many also work in high-risk sectors such as mining, domestic labour, fireworks manufacturing and fishing."They work in truly inhuman, overheated spaces. They are not given even the minimum safety measures, such as facemasks so they do not inhale lint from jeans, or gloves for tearing seams, which hurts their fingers. The repetitive work of cutting fabric with large scissors hurts their hands." -- Joaquín Cortez

Three countries in the region, Brazil, Mexico and Paraguay, exemplify child labour, which includes forms of modern-day slavery.

In Paraguay, a country of 7.2 million people, the tradition of “criadazgo” goes back to colonial times and persists despite laws that prohibit child labour, lawyer Cecilia Gadea told IPS.

“Very poor families, usually from rural areas, are forced to give their under-age children to relatives or families who are financially better off, who take charge of their upbringing, education and food,” a practice known as “criadazgo”, she explained.

“But it is not for free or out of solidarity, but in exchange for the children carrying out domestic work,” said Gadea, who is doing research on the topic for her master’s thesis at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Flacso).

In Paraguay, the country in South America with the highest poverty rate and one of the 10 most unequal countries in the world, some 47,000 children (2.5 percent of the child population) are in a situation of criadazgo, according to the non-governmental organisation Global Infancia. Of these, 81.6 percent are girls.

“People do not want to accept it, but it is one of the worst forms of work. It is not a solidarity-based action as people try to present it; it is a form of child labour and exploitation. It is also a kind of slavery because children are subjected to carrying out forced tasks not appropriate to their age, they are punished, and many may not even be allowed to leave the house,” said Gadea.

According to the researcher, most of the so-called “criaditos” (little servants), ranging in age from five to 15, are “subjected to forced labour, domestic tasks for many hours and without rest; they are mistreated, abused, punished and exploited; they are not allowed to go to school; they live in precarious conditions; they are not fed properly; and they do not receive medical care, among other limitations.”

Only a minority of them “are not abused or exposed to danger, go to school, play, are well cared for, and all things considered, lead a good life,” she said.

The origins of criadazgo lay in the hazardous forced labour to which the Spanish colonisers subjected indigenous women and children, said Gadea.

Paraguay was devastated by two wars, one in the second half of the nineteenth century and another in the first half of the twentieth century, its male population decimated, and was left in the hands of women, children and the elderly, who had to rebuild the country.

“The widespread poverty forced mothers to give their children to families with better incomes, so they could take charge of their upbringing, education and food, while the mothers worked to survive and rebuild a country left in ruins,” she said.

The practice continues, according to Gadea, because of inequality and poverty. Large low-income families “find the only solution is handing over one or more of their children for them to be provided with better living conditions.”

On the other hand, “there are people who need these ‘criados’ to work as domestics, because they are cheap labour, since they only require a little food and a place to sleep,” she said.

Campaigns to combat this tradition that is deeply-rooted in Paraguayan society face resistance from many sectors, including Congress.

It is a “hidden and invisible practice that is hardly talked about. Many defend it because they consider it an act of solidarity, a means of survival for children living in extreme poverty,” she added.

The case of Mexico

Mexico is another of the Latin American countries with the highest levels of child labour exploitation, in sectors such as agriculture, or maquiladoras – for-export assembly plants.

A boy works in a maquiladora textile plant in the state of Puebla, in central Mexico. Credit: Courtesy of Joaquín Cortez

In Mexico, with a population of 122 million people, there are more than 2.5 million children working – 8.4 percent of the child population. The problem is concentrated in the states of Colima, Guerrero and Puebla, explains Joaquín Cortez, author of the study “Modern Child Slavery: Cases of Child Labour Exploitation in the Maquiladoras.”

Cortez researched in particular the textile maquilas of the central state of Puebla.

Children there “work in extremely precarious conditions, in addition to working more than 48 hours a week, receiving wages of between 29 and 40 dollars per week. To withstand the workloads they often inhale drugs like marijuana or crack,” the researcher from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) told IPS.

In some maquilas “strategies have been used to evade accountability. As in the case of working children who, in the face of labour inspections, are hidden in the bathrooms between the bundles of jeans,” said Cortez.

“They work in truly inhuman, overheated spaces. They are not given even the minimum safety measures, such as facemasks so they do not inhale lint from jeans, or gloves for tearing seams, which hurts their fingers. The repetitive work of cutting fabric with large scissors hurts their hands,” he said.

In short, Cortez noted that “they are more at risk because they work as much as or more than an adult and earn less.”

At times, these children “are verbally assaulted for not rushing to get the production that the manager of the maquiladoras needs. Girls are also often sexually harassed by their co-workers,” he added.

Cortez attributes the causes of this child labour, “in addition to being cheap labour for the owners of small and large maquiladoras,” to inequality and poverty and to poor social organisation, despite attempts at resistance.

The situation in Brazil

In Brazil, a study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), published in 2017, found that of the 1.8 million children between the ages of five and 17 who work, 54.4 percent do so illegally.

In this South American country of 208 million people, the laws allow children to work from the age of 14 but only as apprentices, while adolescents between the ages of 16 and 18 cannot work the night shift and cannot work in dangerous or unhealthy conditions.

One of the authors of the report, economist Flávia Vinhaes, clarified to IPS that although child labor does not always occur in conditions of slavery or semi-slavery, “children between the ages of five and 13 should not work under any conditions, as it is considered child labour.”

Among those employed at that age, 74 percent did not receive remuneration.

Another indicator revealed that 73 percent of these children worked as “assistants”, helping family members in their productive activities.

“Both domestic tasks and care work make up a broad definition of child labor that may be in conflict with formal education as well as being carried out over long hours or under dangerous conditions,” Vinhaes said.

The research showed that 47.6 percent of workers between the ages of five and 13 are in the agricultural sector, part of a deep-rooted custom.

“In traditional agriculture, children and adolescents perform work under the supervision of their parents as part of the socialisation process, or as a means of passing on traditionally acquired techniques from parents to children,” she said.

“This situation should not be confused with that of children who are forced to work regularly or day after day in exchange for some kind of remuneration or just to help their families, with the resulting damage to their educational and social development,” she said. “There is a fine line between helping and working in a way that is cultural and educational.”

The IV Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour, held in the Argentine capital, concluded with an urgent call to accelerate efforts to eradicate this major problem by 2025, a goal of the international community that today does not appear to be feasible. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 17 2017 (IPS)

The IV Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour,  which drew nearly 2000 delegates from 190 countries to the Argentine capital, left many declarations of good intentions but nothing to celebrate.

Child labour is declining far too slowly, in the midst of unprecedented growth in migration and forced displacement that aggravate the situation, said representatives of governments, workers and employers in the Buenos Aires Declaration on Child Labour Forced Labour and Youth Employment.

The document, signed at the end of the Nov. 14-16 meeting, recognises that unless something changes, the goals set by the international community will not be met.

As a result, there is a pressing need to “Accelerate efforts to end child labour in all its forms by 2025,” the text states.

In the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), target seven of goal eight – which promotes decent work – states that child labour in all its forms is to be eradicated by 2025."The increase in child labour in the countryside has to do with informal employment. Most of the children work in family farming, without pay, in areas where the state does not reach.” -- Junko Sazaki

“For the first time, this Conference recognised that child labour is mostly concentrated in agriculture and is growing,” said Bernd Seiffert, focal point on child labour, gender, equity and rural employment at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“While the general numbers for child labour dwindled from 162 million to 152 million since 2013, in rural areas the number grew: from 98 to 108 million,” he explained in a conversation with IPS.

Seiffert said: “We heard a lot in this conference about the role played by child labour in global supply chains. But the majority of boys and girls work for the local value chains, in the production of food.”

The declared aim of the Conference, organised by the Argentine Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Security with technical assistance from the International Labour Organisation (ILO), was to “take stock of the progress made” since the previous meeting, held in 2013 in Brasilia.

Guest of honour 2014 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Kailash Satyarthi said he was “confident that the young will be able to steer the situation that we are leaving them,” but warned that it would not make sense to hold a new conference in four years if the situation remains the same.

Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in his country, India, in defence of children’s rights, and in particular for his fight against forced labour, from which he has saved thousands of children.

“We know that children are used because they are the cheapest labour force. But I ask how much longer we are going to keep coming to these conferences to go over the same things again. The next meeting should be held only if it is to celebrate achievements,” he said.

Junko Sasaki, director of the Social Policies and Rural Institutions Division at FAO, said “the increase in child labour in the countryside has to do with informal employment. Most of the children work in family farming, without pay, in areas where the state does not reach.”

“We must promote the incorporation of technologies and good agricultural practices to allow many poor families to stop having to make their children work,” she told IPS.

According to the ILO, as reflected by the final declaration, 71 percent of child labour is concentrated in agriculture, and 42 percent of that work is hazardous and is carried out in informal and family enterprises.

“There are also gender differences. While it is common for children to be exposed to pesticides that can affect their health, girls usually have to work more on household chores. In India, for example, many girls receive less food than boys,” said Sazaki.

Children were notably absent from the crowded event, which brought together government officials and delegates of international organisations, the business community and trade unionists.

Their voice was only heard through the presentation of the document “It’s Time to Talk”, the result of research carried out by civil society organisations, which interviewed 1,822 children between the ages of five and 18 who work, in 36 countries.

The study revealed that children who work do so mainly to help support their families, and that their main concern is the conditions in which they work.

They feel good if their work allows them to continue studying, if they can learn from work and earn money; and they become frustrated when their education is hindered, when they do not develop any skills, or their health is affected.

“We understand that children who work have no other option and that we should not criminalise but protect them and make sure that the conditions in which they perform tasks do not put them at risk or prevent their education,” said Anne Jacob, of the Germany-based Kindernothilfe, one of the organisations that participated in the research.

For Jacob, “it is outrageous that the problem of child labour should be addressed without listening to children.”

“After talking with them, we understood that there is no global solution to this issue, but that the structural causes can only be resolved locally, depending on the economic, cultural and social circumstances of each place,” she told IPS.

The participants in the Conference warned in the final declaration that armed conflicts, which affect 250 million children, are aggravating the situation of child labour.

Virginia Gamba, special representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, explained that “modern armed conflicts use children as if they were disposable materials. Children are no longer in the periphery of conflicts but at the centre.”

In this respect, she pointed out that hundreds of thousands of children are left without the possibility of access to formal education every year in different parts of the world. Her office counted 750 attacks on schools in the midst of armed conflict in 2016, while this year it registered 175 in just one month.

“To fight child labour and help children, we have to think about mobile learning and home-based education. Education must be provided even in the most fragile situations, even in refugee camps, since that is the only means of providing normality for a child in the midst of a conflict,” said Gamba.

In the end, the Conference left the bitter sensation that solutions are still far away.

ILO Director-General Guy Ryder warned that the concentration of child labour in rural work indicates that it often has nothing to do with employers, but with families.

It is easy for some to blame transnational corporations or governments. But the truth is that it is everyone’s fault, he concluded.

Many Pacific Island states, including Papua New Guinea, have introduced free education policies resulting in primary school enrolments surging. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Mar 24 2017 (IPS)

In the South Pacific nation of Fiji, free and compulsory education, introduced three years ago, in association with better awareness and child protection measures, is helping to reduce children’s vulnerability to harmful and hazardous forms of work.

But eliminating child labour, which is also prevalent in other Pacific Island states, such as Papua New Guinea and Samoa, is dependent on growing decent remunerated work and reducing inequality as well.“Because of the level of poverty, particularly in settlement areas, there are a ton of children on the streets who are not engaged in education, they are not in school.” --Reverend Ronald Brown

“The introduction of free education in Fiji has dramatically reduced the problem of child labour,” a spokesperson for Fiji’s Ministry of Employment, Productivity and Industrial Relations, told IPS, with the number of reported child labour cases falling from 64 in 2011 to five last year.

The government’s education initiative is supported by other measures, such as increased staff capacity in the Ministry of Employment to carry out thousands of inspections for child labour and enforce labour regulation compliance. And in 2015 a toll free helpline was set up for members of the public, including children, to report any form of child labour, abuse or neglect.

However, Fay Volatabu, General Secretary of Fiji’s National Council of Women, told IPS that, while she recognized the government’s good initiatives, “children still sell pastries and doormats when we go shopping at night and that should be rest or homework time. Yet no-one is sending them home or checking up on their parents and taking them to task for still making their children work.”

Studies conducted in Fiji and Papua New Guinea (PNG) by the International Labour Organization (ILO) during the past decade identified poverty and financial difficulties as the major driving factors of child labour with children engaged in street vending, begging and scavenging and young girls vulnerable to prostitution and domestic servitude.

More than 60 percent of children surveyed on the streets in both countries were involved in hazardous work, such as carrying heavy loads and handling scrap metal, while 6.8 percent in Fiji and 43 percent in Port Moresby, PNG’s capital, were trapped in commercial sexual exploitation. A study of 1,611 children in Fiji in 2009 drew a correlation between students dropping out of school and the prevalence of child workers, with 65 percent of the latter not in education.

Lack of economic growth, high unemployment and low wages are major factors contributing to poverty in the region with only two of 14 Pacific Island Forum countries, Cook Islands and Niue, achieving MDG 1, the reduction of poverty. The size of households is also a factor with the hardship rate rising in Fiji from zero for a family with one child to 44 percent for a family of three or more children, reports the World Bank. For many poorer families the costs of schooling are prohibitive and sending children out to work is a way of surviving and meeting basic needs.

The value of education to human and economic development, well understood by Pacific Island governments, has been the impetus for free education being implemented in numerous countries, such as Fiji, PNG, Tonga, Cook Islands and the Solomon Islands, and compulsory education in some.

In 2012 the PNG Government removed tuition fees for students in Elementary Prep to Grade 10 and subsidized education for those in late secondary years 11-12. However, while enrolment figures have surged, Reverend Ronald Brown, Chief Executive Officer of City Mission PNG, a Christian non-profit social welfare organization, told IPS that children were still highly visible in the capital selling small goods, such as betelnut and cigarettes, particularly near informal settlements.

“Because of the level of poverty, particularly in settlement areas, there are a ton of children on the streets who are not engaged in education, they are not in school,” Reverend Brown said.

He continued that “the issue is also that there are hidden costs in every school. Many schools charge project fees, which can amount to K50 (15 dollars) per child and up. There is also the purchase of uniforms, which are extremely expensive.”

Both PNG and Fiji have ratified the ILO Minimum Age Convention (No. 138) and Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention (No. 182). Yet City Mission PNG is seeing increasing numbers of trafficked minors.

“We are dealing with more and more children, young girls who are being internally trafficked into prostitution. In 2012, we had about 20-25 women and children in our Crisis Support Centre, now there are 50,” Reverend Brown said. Although he acknowledged it was unclear if the rise in statistics was due to a real increase in cases or wider awareness of the issue.

Fiji, which, together with PNG, participated in the TACKLE project, a joint program by the European Union, ACP Secretariat and ILO to combat child labour through education-related initiatives from 2008-2013, has been rolling out awareness in urban and rural communities in a bid to grapple with the issue at the grassroots.

“So far a total of 200 teachers and 50 police officers together with 150 community leaders and farmers have been trained in the area of child labour and the importance of sending children to school through the free education program,” the Ministry of Employment spokesperson said.

But, even with increased numbers of children accessing primary education, the retention of students to the completion of secondary school remains low in some Pacific Island countries, while many are unable to provide adequate jobs for those who graduate.

An estimated 57 percent of enrolled primary students in PNG complete the last grade, while only 12.5 percent of the estimated 80,000 annual school leavers secure formal employment. In Fiji up to 94 percent of primary level students make the transition to secondary level, but unemployment among youth remains a challenge at 18.2 percent in 2015, according to ILO data.

Aboudi, 12, spends his evenings selling flowers outside Beirut's bars. His parents are stuck in his war-torn hometown Aleppo in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 3 2015 (IPS)

In a conflict that has claimed over 220,000 lives and injured a further 840,000 people as of January 2015, it is sometimes hard to see beyond the death toll.

What started as a confrontation between pro-democracy activists and the entrenched dictatorship of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011, Syria’s civil war is today one of the world’s most bitter conflicts, involving over four separate armed groups and touching numerous other countries in the region.

“I feel responsible for my family. I feel like I’m still a child and would love to go back to school, but my only option is to work hard to put food on the table for my family." -- Ahmed, a 12-year-old Syrian refugee in Jordan
With millions on the brink of starvation and displaced Syrians now representing the largest refugee population in the world, after Palestinians, scores of lesser-known war-related atrocities are jostling for space in the headlines.

On Jul. 2, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children released a joint report highlighting one of the hidden impacts of the Syrian crisis – a rise in child labour throughout the region.

In a press release issued in Jordan’s capital, Amman, Thursday, the agencies warned, “Syria’s children are paying a heavy price for the world’s failure to put an end to the conflict.

“The report shows that inside Syria, children are now contributing to the family income in more than three quarters of surveyed households, In Jordan, close to half of all Syrian refugee children are now the joint or sole family breadwinners in surveyed households, while in some parts of Lebanon, children as young as six years old are reportedly working.”

“The most vulnerable of all working children are those involved in armed conflict, sexual exploitation and illicit activities including organised begging and child trafficking,” the release stated.

Before the outbreak of war four years ago, Syria was considered a middle-income country, providing its people a decent standard of living and boasting a literacy rate of 90 percent, according to UNICEF data.

By the middle of 2015, however, four in five Syrians were living below the poverty line and 7.6 million were classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs).

With whole cities and towns emptied of residents, businesses and industries have collapsed, sending unemployment rates soaring from 14.9 percent in 2011 to 57.7 percent today.

The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that about 3.3 million people have fled the country altogether and now live in camps or makeshift shelters in neighbouring states. Women and children comprise over half the refugee population.

The vast majority of those who remain inside Syria – over 64.7 percent – are classified as living in “extreme poverty”, unable to meet the most basic food or sanitary needs.

Thus, experts say, it comes as no surprise that children are becoming breadwinners, taking to the streets and selling their labour in a range of industries to help keep their families alive.

As 12-year-old Ahmed, a Syrian refugee in Jordan, pointed out in interviews with UNICEF, “I feel responsible for my family. I feel like I’m still a child and would love to go back to school, but my only option is to work hard to put food on the table for my family.”

Entitled ‘Small Hands, Heavy Burden: How the Syrian Conflict is Driving More Children into the Workforce’, the report notes that an estimated 2.7 million Syrian children are currently out of school.

With few education opportunities and dwindling humanitarian rations, these children now either comprise, or are at risk of joining the ranks of, a veritable army of child workers.

“In Jordan, for example a majority of working children in host communities work six or seven days a week; one-third work more than eight hours a day,” the report noted. “Their daily income is between four and seven dollars.”

Quite aside from representing an irreversible interruption to their education, cognitive development, and – almost certainly – limiting their chances of securing better jobs later in life – the child labour epidemic is harming young people’s bodies.

Save the Children estimates that “Around 75 percent of working children in the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan reported health problems; almost 40 percent reported an injury, illness or poor health; and 35.8 percent of children working in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley are unable to read or write.”

In this climate of conflict, with the specter of hunger haunting countless families, every industry is considered fair game.

In the Bekaa Valley, for instance, landowners who used to pay a daily wage of 10 dollars to migrant agricultural workers now pay kids four dollars a day, often for performing the same tasks alongside their adult counterparts.

In urban centers, garages, workshops and construction sites are “popular” employers, with 10-year-old Syrian boys hired on a full-time basis to do carpentry, metal work or motor repairs in cities across Lebanon.

Street work represents one of the most dangerous occupations for children, with a recent survey of two major Lebanese cities identifying over 1,500 child street-workers, of whom 73 percent were Syrian refugees.

These kids earn an average of 11 dollars a day, either begging or hawking, while illicit activities like prostitution could earn a small child up to 36 dollars in a single working day.

UNICEF says child labour “represents one of the key challenges to the fulfillment of the ‘No Lost Generation’ initiative”, launched in 2013 with the aim of putting child rights and children’s education at the centre of the humanitarian response to the Syrian crisis.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A boy helps his mother, Graciela Ardiles, do chores on their small farm in Arraga in the northern Argentine province of Santiago del Estero. Thanks to a rural development programme that has boosted the family’s income, she says her children will be able to continue studying, and even go on to university, unlike her parents. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 23 2015 (IPS)

Until not too long ago, youngsters in Argentina faced a choice: whether to study or drop out and go to work. But now most children and adolescents in Argentina who work also continue to study – a change that poses new challenges for combating school dropout, repetition and truancy, as well as the circle of poverty.

The change is revealing, according to Néstor López at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s International Institute for Education Planning (IIEP UNESCO), which together with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) produced the report “Trabajo infantil y trayectorias escolares protegidas en Argentina” on child labour and education, launched this month, which discusses the new situation.

“When you analysed what was happening with teenagers 20 years ago, you saw two different situations,” López said in an interview with IPS. “There were adolescents in school and adolescents who worked.”

“But what you see now is that school enrollment rates have gone up significantly, which has meant to some extent a reduction in their rates of participation in the labour market, but has also meant an increase in the proportion of adolescents who both study and work,” he said.

In 2013, practically all children in Argentina between the ages of five and 14 and 84 percent of adolescents between 15 and 17 were in school, the study says.

Gustavo Ponce, an ILO expert in prevention and eradication of child labour, said measures like the 2006 National Education Law, which made education obligatory until the last year of secondary school (17 or 18 years of age), contributed to the new trend of adolescents working and studying at the same time.

“Progress has also been made in terms of legislation and regulations, with a law that raised the minimum working age to 16, which included the question of protection of adolescent workers aged 16 and 17,” Ponce told IPS.

He was referring to a law that protects young people from heavy or dangerous work, or work that makes it impossible for them to attend school or endangers their health.

He was also referring to the 2013 reform of the penal code, which made child labour a crime.

In their report, the ILO and UNESCO mentioned these measures as well as others, such as the Universal Child Allowance cash transfer programme, which have helped discourage child labour by boosting the incomes of poor families.

“Yes, you could say there has been a policy to eradicate child labour,” said Ponce.

López said that what is needed now is to continue improving school enrollment and attendance among adolescents. According to the new study, of the children between the ages of five and 13 who both work and attend school, approximately one-third repeat the year, compared to 13 percent of children who do not work.

With regard to truancy, the report cites statistics from a Labour Ministry survey of activities among children and adolescents, pointing out that 20 percent of those who both work and study frequently miss school, compared to 10 percent of those who only attend school.

And in the case of adolescents who work, 26 percent do not go to school, and 43 percent of those who do attend school are held back. Among those who only study, 27 percent repeat the year.

“It’s better than if they were just working,” said López. “It’s good for kids who are working to also be studying, preparing for their future. You could say it’s a positive thing if the kids who have to work can also go to school.”

Overall, though, “it’s negative because what the statistics, studies and common sense show is that these kids have a lower quality educational experience, because they don’t have time to do their homework, they don’t have time to study, they go to school tired, they miss school more, and they get less out of the educational experience for different reasons,” he added.

According to the Labour Ministry, child labour was reduced 66 percent from 2004 to 2012 – from 450,000 children working in 2004 to 180,000 in 2012.

But another concern are less visible forms of child labour, such as unpaid housework and caregiving, which especially affect girls and young women, including caring for younger siblings, cleaning the house, fixing meals, and taking care of small barnyard animals.

“Educational level is one of the main mechanisms used by the labour market to select workers. Access or lack of access to formal education is one of the aspects most heavily associated with the process of intergenerational accumulation of social disadvantage,” says the report.

Among the measures to encourage school attendance, the ILO proposes improving the network of free public services that support caregivers, including childcare centres, preschools, and double shifts in schools. In Argentina, schoolchildren attend either the morning or the afternoon shift. But full-day schools are becoming more common in low-income areas, enabling mothers to work.

The ILO also proposes campaigns to combat certain beliefs or customs, especially in rural areas.

“When we interview parents, for example, it’s clear that they think it’s normal to feed and milk the livestock before going to school, as if it were a way to help out at home and a positive learning experience rather than work that children do at home,” the report says.

The trade unions, meanwhile, say the concept of eradicating child labour should also be included in the educational curriculum.

Hernán Rugirello, with the Confederación General del Trabajo central trade union’s social research centre, told IPS about an initiative carried out by the union in Mar del Plata, a city 400 km south of Buenos Aires. With the help of the teachers’ union, the issues surrounding child labour have begun to be taught in schools there.

“It’s important to put this problem on the agenda, so that young people will also start understanding it and will become agents of transmission of knowledge, bringing the issues home with them,” he said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Child rag pickers earn up to five dollars daily recycling rubbish and scrap, contributing to household income at the expense of going to school. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Jun 9 2015 (IPS)

In a bid to overhaul the country’s child labour laws, the Indian government has banned the employment of children below 14 years of age in various commercial ventures, while permitting them to work in family enterprises and on farmlands after school hours and during vacations.

“In a large number of families, children help their parents in occupations like agriculture and artisanship. And while helping the parents, children also learn the basics of occupations,” stated a note by the Union Cabinet, which approved an amendment to the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act of 1986.

"The new amendment will push millions of innocent children into forced labour and deprive them of education and a normal childhood." -- Rakesh Slenger of Bachpan Bachao Andolan
The Act defines 64 industries as hazardous, deeming it a criminal offence for children to employed in any of them. While parents or guardians will not face any punishment for the first offence, a maximum fine of about 150 dollars will be levied for the second and subsequent offences.

The new amendment will, however, permit kids to work in “non-hazardous” businesses, the entertainment industry (including films, advertisements and TV serials) and sporting events from the 18 occupations and 65 processes specified under the 1986 law.

The government’s directive has triggered a raucous debate on the subject in India at a time when public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour of a complete ban on all types of employment for children.

Indian Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, who helms the child rights non-profit organisation Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has been calling for a ban on every form of child labour in India for kids up to 14 years of age.

Activists fear that the provision allowing children to help out in domestic or family-based occupations will enable families to flout or skirt the new law.

“The new amendment will push millions of innocent children into forced labour and deprive them of education and a normal childhood,” Rakesh Slenger of Bachpan Bachao Andolan told IPS. “The girl child will be particularly disadvantaged as she will be denied education while being stuck with all the household work.”

Experts also fear this loophole violates the spirit of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which India signed and ratified in 1992.

The worst off will be kids from marginalized backgrounds who need to equip themselves with an education and job skills in Asia’s third largest economy to brighten their employment prospects.

The government’s contention that once the law is changed it will help impoverished families earn a living while equipping children with job skills is also myopic, say child rights crusaders. They emphasize that India’s poor law enforcement system and weak policing standards will hinder efforts to keep tabs on exploitative families.

Others say this gap in the law will reverse India’s gains in moving children from workplaces into classrooms in line with the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of achieving universal primary education by the end of 2015.

It will also contravene the Right to Education Act (RTE) 2009, which guarantees a child the right to complete his or her elementary education even after the age of 14.

Experts also allege the government is overlooking the fact that even in household enterprises, children still remain vulnerable to exploitation and health hazards, which impacts their education.

Others have raised a red flag about the possibility of children being pushed into work in the entertainment or sporting industry by ambitious parents.

Activists in India are up in arms over the government’s amendment to the country’s child labour law, which allows children under the age of 14 to work in certain designated ‘family businesses’. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) says child labour is “a violation of fundamental human rights”, which impairs a child’s development, potentially leading to lifelong physical or psychological damage.

The organisation’s comprehensive research on the subject demonstrates that eliminating child labour can help developing economies generate economic benefits nearly seven times greater than the costs incurred in better schooling and social services.

India would do well to heed this warning. The country has the dubious distinction of hosting the largest number of child labourers in the world.

The 2011 census puts the number at 4.35 million working children in the 5-14 age bracket. One in every 100 full-time workers in India is under the age of 14, and a third of those child workers are under the age of nine.

This augurs ill for a country of 1.25 billion people, 42 percent of whom are children. Already, many kids are at risk of languishing in an endless cycle of poverty – an estimated 23 percent of the population survives on less than 1.25 dollars a day – particularly since the government slashed the budget allocation for the ministry of women and child development by 1.5 billion dollars this year.

Activists say this move could deprive millions of marginalised Indian kids the chance to turn their lives around.

According to a report by the Ministry of Labour, Indian child workers are engaged in a wide range of hazardous and stressful occupations.

Kids in the agriculture sector are made to carry heavy loads and sprinkle harmful pesticides on crops. Last October, a blast at a cramped firecracker-manufacturing unit in the East Godavari district of the southeast state of Andhra Pradesh left almost a dozen people dead, including many children.

India’s beedi (cigarette)-making industry is particularly notorious for employing kids as young as seven years old. While government figures put the total number of workers engaged in this informal industry at 4.4 million, activists claim the real number is nearly double that, totaling roughly 10 million labourers.

Worse, production of beedis involves prolonged exposure to tobacco leaves, which can cause life-threatening diseases like tuberculosis, chronic bronchitis, asthma and malnutrition among others.

So-called “family enterprises” are no better, say experts. This includes such industries as matchbox making, carpet weaving and gem polishing. In these sectors, where child labour is in high demand, police raids have highlighted inhumane conditions in which children are made to work for no pay, with scant food and no access to toilets.

“A closer scrutiny of the government’s [amendment] reveals that children of all ages may in fact be used for labour in some of the most hazardous industries in the country. The Cabinet’s idea of striking a balance between the need for education for a child and helping parents to earn better incomes makes no sense,” says Amod Kanth, founder of Prayaas, a non-profit working for children’s welfare.

According to the social activist, relaxing legislation on child labour as a means of alleviating poverty is a deeply flawed strategy. “The move will nullify whatever progress the country has made in getting children out of forced labour and into school. As it is government surveys are known to under-report child labour. If child labour is legalised, the situation will spiral out of control,” Kanth told IPS.

Even a report by the Parliamentary Standing Committee On the Child Labour Amendment Act underscores the fallacy of the government proposing to keep a check on children working in their homes.

“The Ministry is itself providing loopholes by inserting this proviso since it would be very difficult to make out whether children are merely helping their parents or are working to supplement the family income. Further, allowing children to work after school is detrimental to their health, as rest and recreation is important for fullest physical and mental development in the formative years, besides adversely affecting their studies,” states the report.

Rather than going in for piecemeal amendments to current laws, activists say the government should revamp the flagship 1986 Act itself, which has failed to curb child labour effectively.

A new beginning will also pave way for the rehabilitation of millions of children rescued from exploitative industries or households, they say.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Children who work on tobacco farms in the U.S. are vulnerable to nicotine poisoning, especially when handling wet tobacco leaves. Credit: MgAdDept/CC-BY-SA

By Valentina Ieri
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 6 2015 (IPS)

For many young people, the summer is synonymous with free time, relaxation, or family vacations. For less fortunate kids the summer means labour, with scores of youths taking on part-time work to support their families.

In the U.S., not only is this work not optional, it is also unhealthy – especially for those unfortunate enough to seek employment on the country’s tobacco farms.

“The hardest of all the crops we’ve worked [with] is tobacco. You get tired. It takes energy out of you. You get sick, but then you have to go right back to the tobacco the next day.” -- Dario, a child labourer interviewed by Human Rights Watch (HRW)
A recent string of policies aimed at addressing child labour in this major industry signals a turning point – but activists say the uphill battle is not yet over.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) recently released a report detailing conditions of child labour in four of the country’s main tobacco-producing states – North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia – which together account for 90 percent of domestic tobacco production. In 2012, the total value of tobacco leaves produced in the U.S. touched 1.5 billion dollars.

According to the report, most of these children, sometimes as young as 12 years old, come from Hispanic immigrants families, and work on tobacco farms to help their families to pay rent and bills, and buy food and school supplies.

Margaret Wurth, co-author of the report and children’s rights researcher at HRW, told IPS that many children “chose to do this difficult job because there are no other job opportunities in the communities where they live […].”

Out of the 141 children interviewed by HRW, two-thirds suffered from acute nicotine poisoning, or Green Tobacco Sickness (GTS) while working on plantations. GTS happens when workers absorb nicotine through their skin while handling tobacco plants, especially when the leaves are wet.

Sixteen-year-old Dario, who has worked on farms in Kentucky, said in an interview with HRW, “The hardest of all the crops we’ve worked [with] is tobacco. You get tired. It takes energy out of you. You get sick, but then you have to go right back to the tobacco the next day.”

Typical symptoms include dizziness, vomiting, nausea, and headaches. Some children also reported that employers did not guarantee training courses or safety equipment. Some had to work barefoot; others wore only socks as they worked in fields thick with mud, according to HRW research.

Fabiana, 14, said to HRW, “I wore plastic bags because our clothes got wet in the morning. They put holes in the bag so our hands could go through them […]. Then the sun comes out and you feel suffocated in the bags. You want to take them off.”

A giant industry in need of reform

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2012 the U.S. produced nearly 800 million pounds of tobacco. The U.S. is the fourth leading tobacco producer in the world, after China, Brazil and India but unlike its competitors, the U.S. does not regulate the age of its employees on the tobacco fields, according to Alfonso Lopez, Democratic representative of the Virginia House of Delegates.

Recently, Virginia had the chance to become the first U.S. state to enact a law on child labour in tobacco plantations, in order to set a standard for all tobacco growers to protect children. But the proposed bill was defeated.

“My bill would prohibit hiring children under 18 to work in direct contact with tobacco leaves, or dried tobacco, with the exception of children who received parental consent to work in family farms,” Lopez explained to IPS.

Pressure from advocates, and studies like the one produced last year by HRW are slowly bearing fruit, with two large associations of tobacco farmers – the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina (TGANC) and the Council for Burley Tobacco in Kentucky – adopting new policies that prevent the hiring of children under the age of 16, and requiring parental consent for children aged 16-17.

This, in turn, led to two major U.S. tobacco companies – the Virginia-based Altria Group, parent company of Philip Morris USA, and the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJRT) – adopting similar policies, for the safety of children working along the tobacco supply chain, Wurth said.

In 2014, three companies – Philip Morris USA, Reynolds American Inc., and Lorillard – accounted for 85 percent of U.S. cigarettes sales.

An Altria Group spokesperson, Jeff Caldwell, told IPS that in 2014, Altria signed the global pledge of commitment to eliminate any form of child labour in the tobacco supply chain worldwide, promoted by the Eliminating Child Labour in Tobacco Growing Foundation (ECLT).

In 2015, Altria started buy tobacco directly from growers, instead of buying it from third parties, in order to ensure that growers were not hiring children under 18, Caldwell added.

“We also have a very robust programme to train our growers and communicate to all of them the standardised U.S. tobacco good agricultural practices, to ensure that all of these growers are aware of, trained on, and in compliance with policies and laws that govern tobacco growing in order to protect children,” he added.

However, these measures only apply to farms that are part of large corporate supply chains, said Lopez.

“Most of the major buyers of U.S.-grown tobacco have adopted child labour standards more protective than U.S. law. But I think that without a stronger [federal] regulatory framework, dozens of children will inevitably be left out,” he remarked.

Last week the U.S. Department of Labour released a recommended practices bulletin, issued jointly by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

A Department of Labour Spokesperson told IPS that the bulletin focuses on the hazards of working in unsafe and unhealthy working conditions. The guidelines are designed to educate tobacco companies, farmers, and workers on preventing the effects of GTS, through appropriate training and working equipment.

The guidelines recommend the use of gloves, long sleeve shirts, long pants and water-resistant clothing when handling tobacco leaves to prevent exposure to nicotine, while recognising that children may suffer worse consequences than adults if these regulations aren’t met, the spokesperson added.

However, the bulletin made no explicit mention of child labour, nor did it specify ways to tackle the problem through more concrete regulation.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi has called for globalised human compassion to combat the global and persistent problems of child labour and child slavery.

“We live in a globalised world, let us globalise human compassion, ” Satyarthi told an audience at the United Nations Tuesday.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Kailash Satyarthi speaks at the DPI/NGO Special Briefing: Ending Child Slavery by 2030. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Satyarthi, a tireless activist against child labour, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 together with Malala Yousafzai “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

Satyarthi said that he was confident that he would see the end of child servitude in his lifetime but emphasised that everybody had a moral responsibility to address the issue.

Child labour still remains a truly global problem hurting millions of children worldwide.

In South Asia 250,000 children, some as young as four, work up to eighteen hours a day tying knots for rugs that are exported to the U.S. and Europe.

In Haiti, UNICEF estimates that 225,000 children, mostly girls, between the ages of five and 17 live as ‘restaveks’, live-in domestic servants with wealthier families.

In the Central African Republic, the U.N. reports there are some 6,000 child soldiers, including young girls used as sex slaves.

Worldwide more than half of all child labourers work in agriculture, including in the United States where Human Rights Watch reports children working on tobacco farms are exposed to nicotine poisoning.

In total, the International Labor Organization reports that there are 168 million children in child labour, and that more than half of them, 85 million, are in hazardous work.

Satyarthi said that behind every single statistic there is a cry for freedom from a child that we are not listening to.

“That is the cry to be a child, a child who can play, a child who can love, a child who can be a child,” he said.

Satyarthi contrasted the number of children in full time work with the 200 million adults who are jobless worldwide. He explained that addressing this imbalance was a complex issue, in part because in vulnerable populations children were seen as easier to exploit than adults.

Satyarthi also expressed concern that while progress has been made on child labour, the more heinous crime of child slavery has stagnated.

“The number of child slaves, the children in forced labour has not reduced at all”

He said the number of child slaves worldwide had stagnated at 5.5 million for the past fifteen years.

Satyarthi said that the United Nations played a key role in addressing child labour. He emphasised that there needed to be clear language on tackling child labour in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

He also called for greater cooperation between organisations working to protect children to ensure a holistic strategy.

Also speaking at the event, Susan Bissell, UNICEF Chief of Child Protection said, “The first line of defense against falling victim to slavery is the child and his or her family.”

“By empowering families socially and economically and building their resilience to recognise child slavery, and being aware of their rights and how to exercise them, we can deliver a first strong blow against slavery,” she said.

Bissell also called on the private sector to stamp out child slavery, saying that children’s rights should be seen as a relevant business mandate.

Satyarthi concluded his speech with a strong call to action.

“If one single child anywhere in the world is in danger the world is not safe. If one single girl is sold like an animal and sexually abused and raped, we cannot call ourselves a cultured society.

“I refuse to accept that some children are born to live without human dignity,” he added. “Each one of you has some moral responsibility. It cannot go on me alone.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Aasia Riaz (24) is one of Pakistan’s 8.5 million domestic workers. She earns about 8,500 rupees (82 dollars) each month. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Feb 9 2015 (IPS)

Sumaira Salamat, a mother of three in her mid-40s, works every day from ten in the morning until half-past two in the afternoon. She travels between three homes, and in each one she dusts, sweeps, washes utensils, and does the laundry. For her efforts, she earns about 3,000 rupees (29 dollars) per month.

Based in the eastern city of Lahore, capital of the Punjab province, Salamat is one of Pakistan’s estimated 8.5 million domestic workers, who daily perform the hundreds of housekeeping tasks necessary to keep a home spick and span.

"We want to be recognised as workers, just like our counterparts working in factories and hospitals are. We would also like to get old age benefits like pensions when we retire; but most of all we want better wages and proper terms of work." -- Sumaira Salamat, a domestic worker in Lahore
Experts here say that very nearly every middle class family in Pakistan employs some form of domestic help, but while the workers are a mainstay in houses and apartments across the country, the terms of their labour are far from clear; few have fixed working hours, benefits, pensions and proper contracts. Abuse is a frequent occurrence, and the laws governing domestic work are murky.

But things are changing. The recent formation of Pakistan’s first domestic workers trade union, combined with the promise of various bills pending in parliament, have workers here daring to hope that their situation might improve very soon.

Rights violations

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Lahore, Salamat says she has been on a four-year quest to secure some basic rights for herself and her fellow workers.

“It’s only in the last year-and-a-half that these women have finally realised the importance of what it means to become a united force,” she explains.

“We want to be recognised as workers, just like our counterparts working in factories and hospitals are. We would also like to get old age benefits like pensions when we retire; but most of all we want better wages and proper terms of work,” Salamat concluded.

Substandard working conditions are one of the primary grievances of employees in this sector. Many are lured into homes with the promise of a good life and a decent salary. What they find when they arrive is something altogether very different.

Take Sonam Iqbal, 22 and single, who has been a domestic worker since she was 15. “When we are interviewed, we are shown a rosy picture,” she claims, “but slowly and steadily the workload is increased and we cannot even protest.”

Long hours of work and low pay are not the only issues. Many female workers complain that they are always the ones held accountable for any loss of money or valuables in the home.

It is hard to state with any accuracy the number of domestic workers in the country. Labour Department Director Tahir Manzoor is not willing to give even a conservative estimate, explaining to IPS: “They [domestic workers] are largely invisible, isolated and scattered among thousands of homes and apartments.”

The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics states that of the 74 percent of the labour force engaged in the informal sector, a majority is employed in domestic work; this includes men and children.

Still, experts are agreed that the bulk of the industry is fueled by a steady stream of mostly uneducated rural women who flock to urban centres in search of work.

Their hopes of securing a better future, however, are often dashed when they realize their earnings fall far short of even the minimum wage, which is fixed at 10,000 rupees (about 97 dollars) per month in provinces like the Sindh, home to over 30 million people.

Legal mechanisms

Last month, Pakistan’s minister for Inter Provincial Coordination introduced the Minimum Wages for Unskilled Workers (Amendment) Act 2015, which, if passed, will see wages of so-called unskilled workers increase from 97 to about 116 dollars per month in all the provinces.

But there is no guarantee that domestic workers will benefit from it, since there are no mechanisms with which to check implementation.

In fact, except for mention of domestic workers in two legislations, there is no specific law protecting their rights in Pakistan, says Zeenat Hisam, senior research associate at the Karachi-based NGO Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research (PILER).

The two pieces of legislation in question are the Provincial Employees Social Security Ordinance 1965, which states that “employers of a domestic servant” shall be liable to provide medical treatment “at his own cost”; and the Minimum Wages Act of 1961, which covers those employed as domestic labourers.

Despite these provisions, “the government has never notified the minimum wages applicable to domestic workers under this law in the last 53 years,” Hisam told IPS.

Protecting women and children

In December 2014, the Pakistan Workers Federation formed the very first Domestic Workers Trade Union. It has 235 members of which 225 are female domestic workers.

The Union was registered with the Registrar’s Trade Union in Lahore, under the provisions of the Punjab Industrial Relations Act, 2010, and was established under the International Labour Organisation (ILO)’s Gender Equality for Decent Employment project (GE4DE), funded by the Canadian government.

“The ILO is working with Pakistan to bring about changes in laws and policy in accordance with the ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189),” said Razi Mujtaba Haider, a programme officer with the ILO.

Ratified by 17 countries, the convention guarantees fundamental rights to domestic workers, including the right to decent and secure work. With an estimated 52.6 million people employed as domestic workers globally in 2010, the convention governs a massive workforce spread far and wide across the globe.

In keeping with such international standards, Manzoor says the labour department is “working in several areas – building the capacity of the domestic workers so that they have stronger bargaining power; working out a contract form between the employee and employer; fixing per-hour salary to stop exploitation; [providing] benefits and social security and most importantly, restricting employment of children, specially girls aged 14 and under.”

While Pakistan defines a child as a “person below 14 years of age” it does not declare domestic work as hazardous.

Manzoor says the Punjab assembly is on the verge of enacting the Prohibition of the Employment of Children Act 2014, which he hopes will restrict the use of child labourers in domestic settings.

Quoting various media reports, Hamza Hasan, a manager of the research and communications section of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), says that between 2010 and 2013, a total of “51 cases of torture of child domestic workers were reported from different parts of Pakistan resulting in the deaths of 24 children”.

He added that in 2013 alone eight children working in homes died, likely from overwork or abuse.

Both industry experts and employees are waiting anxiously for the sweeping changes that will relegate such horror stories to a thing of the past. But until the necessary laws are passed and ratified, Pakistan’s domestic workers will continue to toil for long hours, and low pay.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Lambada women, who never went to school, now keep vigil over young girls in the community. When a child stays away from the classroom for too long, they sound the alarm against possible child labour or trafficking. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
CHANDAMPET, India, Jan 26 2015 (IPS)

At 11 years of age, Banawat Gangotri already has four years of work experience as a farm labourer. The child, a member of the nomadic Lambada community from the village of Bugga Thanda in India’s southern Telangana state, plucked cotton and chillies from nine a.m. until 5 p.m. for about a dollar daily.

Every day, her father collected her earnings, and spent it on alcohol.

“If there is nothing to eat and no land to grow food, what options do we have but to send our children out to earn?” -- Khetawat Jamku, a 50-year-old Lambada woman from the south Indian state of Telangana
In mid-January, however, the cycle was broken. Hours before her father took her to Guntur, a chilli-producing district 168 km away, Gangotri was rescued and brought to a residential school in the neighbouring block of Devarakonda, where she is now enrolled in the fourth grade.

A local non-profit called the Gramya Resource Centre for Women (Gramya) runs the school. It also mobilizes the Lambada people against child trafficking, child abuse and infanticide, all frequent occurrences in the community.

The school currently has 65 children like Gangotri – rescued either from child employers or human traffickers.

“I like school,” Gangotri tells IPS. “When I grow up I’ll be a teacher.”

It is a simple dream, but it is more than most girls from her background can hope for: Gangotri’s is one of just 40 villages across the country to have a Child Protection Committee, a 12-member community vigilante group that acts against trafficking and forced child labour.

Trained by Gramya in children and women’s rights, this committee keeps a hawkish eye on school-aged girls in the village. If a child doesn’t attend school for a few weeks, they sound the alarm: a long absence usually means the girl has either been employed, or married off.

Still, some manage to slip away. The day Gangotri was rescued, Banawat Nirosha, a 12-year-old girl from the Mausanngadda village, went missing. Villagers soon find out that her landless farm-worker parents had left to work as chilli pickers in Guntur, taking along Nirosha – an extra pair of earning hands.

Though the parents are expected to return after March, when the chilli-harvesting season is over, there is a possibility that Nirosha could be married off in Guntur, villagers tell IPS.

Curbing the killing and sale of daughters

While stories like these are common, the vigilante group tells IPS that things have significantly improved in the village, where female infanticide and trafficking of young girls was rampant just 20 years ago.

In March 1999, following the rescue of 57 Lambada infants from a trafficking ring in Telangana’s capital city Hyderabad, police investigations revealed that between 1991 and 2000, some 400 babies from the region were bought and sold under the banner of adoption, though activists fear they most likely ended up as labourers, or entered India’s thriving commercial sex trade.

And in a country where three million girl children are thought to be “missing” each year due to sex-selective abortions and infanticide, children from the Lambada community face a double risk.

In an interview with IPS, Hyderabad-based social activist Rukmini Rao, who founded Gramya in 1997, recalls some of the horrors she has faced in her work, including preventing infant twins from being killed by a family already struggling to support four daughters in a village in Telangana.

Stunned, she and a colleague undertook a study, which found the male-female ratio in the village in question to be 835 female children to every 1,000 males.

Today, thanks to rising awareness and strict community vigil, the sex ratio in the district stands at 983, well above India’s national average of 941 girls for every 1,000 boys.

But activists have a long way to go. In a country where 50 percent of the tribal population lives below the poverty line, surviving on less than a dollar a day, preventing Lambada families from killing or selling their children is an uphill battle.

Suma Latha, a coordinator of Gramya with 14 years of experience in training Lambada women as child rights’ activists, tells IPS that expecting mothers often travel to Hyderabad where they sell their day-old infants for a few thousand rupees, later explaining to the village that the child had died at birth.

“The sale is always against the will of the mother, arranged by the father and the mother-in-law,” Latha says, adding that when Gangotri was rescued, her father had offered to “give away” the girl for 15,000 rupees (about 250 dollars).

With their light-skinned complexions and hazel eyes, Lambada children are very much in demand to fill a growing adoption market, with childless couples hailing mostly from the cities willing to pay handsomely for a beautiful baby.

While some of these children may in fact end up in caring homes, others almost certainly fall into the hands of sex traffickers.

“The middle men who buy babies […] are moved by money not morality,” says Lynette Dumble, a Melbourne-based medical scientist who has studied female infanticide across India for over two decades. “So if the sex traffickers are offering more […] the girls will be sold to them.”

Statistics and records gathered by numerous organisations reveal that Hyderabad, the city closest to the Lambada villages, is a growing hub of sex trafficking.

According to B. Prasada Rao, the director-general of police for the state of Andhra Pradesh, which border Telangana, in 2013 the police had arrested 778 traffickers and rescued 558 victims including minors.

Although this represents only a small part of India’s estimated 30-43 billion-dollar child sex trade, it has activists here seriously concerned about young girls in the community.

Sustainable solutions

Keeping vigil is important, but so too are longer-term solutions designed to tackle the problem at its root.

Many Lambada women believe the key lies in education, urging families to take advantage of free schooling and government stipends aimed at boosting female enrolment rates in rural areas.

But this alone will be insufficient to completely stop the practice of infanticide or the sale of children.

Equally important, researchers say, is providing marginalised communities with alternatives.

Government data indicates that 90 percent of India’s tribal population is landless. In the Nalgonda district of Telangana state, where Gangotri’s father scratches out a living on the margins of existence, 87 percent of all tribal communities are landless.

If the land does not yield enough for subsistence, families will inevitably look elsewhere for their livelihoods.

“If there is nothing to eat and no land to grow food, what options do we have but to send our children to earn?” demands Khetawat Jamku, a 50-year-old Lambada woman.

Experts like Rao say that proper implementation of programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Scheme – designed to provide 100 days of work for 147 rupees (about three dollars) a day to the rural poor – could act as an important deterrent to child labour or trafficking.

But such schemes are weighed down by corruption and mismanagement, leaving a gap that NGOs and civil society are forced to fill, through self-help and community mobilization efforts.

Until Lambada women are given equal rights to land, she contends, it will be very difficult to end the cycle of poverty and violence that puts children at grave risk.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Children from one of the communities in Ocean Division, southern Cameroon, who lost much of their forestland after the government leased it to a logging company. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Dec 9 2014 (IPS)

Just half of major global banks have in place a public policy to respect human rights, according to new research, despite this being a foundational mandate of an international convention on multinational business practice.

Further, of the 32 global banks examined, researchers found that none has publicly put in place a process to deal with human rights abuses, if identified. None has even created grievance mechanisms by which those impacted by potential abuses can complain to the banks.“The findings of this report are quite sobering about what can be expected from self-regulatory principles.” -- Aldo Caliari

The findings, published by BankTrack, an international network of watchdog groups, come three and a half years after the adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. These principles, unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2011, specify a range of actions and obligations for all businesses, including the financial sector.

Yet banks have a unique role in underwriting nearly all of the business activity around the globe, even as they are typically shielded from the impacts of those investments.

“Banks covered in this report have been found to finance companies and projects involving forced removals of communities, child labour, military backed land grabs, and abuses of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination,” the report, released last week, states.

“Policies and processes, open to public scrutiny and backed by adequate reporting, are important tools for banks to ensure that these kinds of abuses do not happen, and that where they do, those whose rights have been impacted have the right to effective remedy … If these policies and procedures are to be meaningful, the finance for such ‘dodgy deals’ must eventually dry up.”

One of the banks studied in the new report, JPMorgan Chase, is one of the leading U.S. financiers of palm oil, through loans and equity investments. While the bank does have a human rights policy, BankTrack’s researchers find this policy applies only to loans, not investments.

“When it comes to reporting on implementation, the bank falls flat, making the policy little more than window-dressing,” Jeff Conant, an international forests campaigner with Friends of the Earth U.S., a watchdog group that is working on palm-oil financing, told IPS.

“We’ve spoken with JPMorgan Chase about the need to give impacted people an opportunity to file complaints about the human rights impacts of its financing, with the belief that this is a first step towards accountability. Frankly, from the bank’s response, I don’t see them stepping up anytime soon.”

While private finance today facilitates almost the full range of corporate activity, Conant notes, “the finance institutions themselves are wholly unaccountable.”

Sobering results

According to the new study, a few banks appear to be well on their way to conformity with the Guiding Principles. The top-ranked institution, the Dutch Rabobank, received a score of eight out of 12, with Credit Suisse and UBS close behind.

These are the exceptions, however. Against a set of 12 criteria, the average score was only a three.

Many scored at or near zero. While those ranked at the very bottom include several Chinese institutions, they also include banks in the European Union and the United States.

Indeed, Bank of America, one of the largest financial institutions in the world, scored just 0.5 out of 12, receiving a minor bump for having expressed some commitment to carrying out human rights-related due diligence. (The bank failed to respond to request for comment for this story by deadline.)

“The findings of this report are quite sobering about what can be expected from self-regulatory principles,” Aldo Caliari, the director of the Rethinking Bretton Woods Project at the Center of Concern, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“The Guiding Principles are the bare minimum of any human rights framework in the corporate sector, a framework that has the companies’ consent. So the fact that there is so little [adherence to] such a relatively weak tool, where every effort to court corporations’ support has been made, is, indeed, very telling.”

Despite the spectrum of findings on implementation, the financial services industry as a whole has taken note of the Guiding Principles.

In 2011, four European banks met to discuss the principles’ potential implications for the sector. Three more banks eventually joined what is now called the Thun Group, and in October 2013 the grouping released an initial paper on the results of these discussions, including recommendations for compliance.

A previously existing set of voluntary guidelines for the banking sector, known as the Equator Principles, were also updated in 2013 to reflect the new existence of the Guiding Principles. So far, the Equator Principles have been signed by 80 financial institutions in 34 countries.

“To date, banks’ efforts to implement the UN Guiding Principles have mainly revolved around producing discussion papers on the best way forward,” Ryan Brightwell, the new report’s author, said in a statement.

“BankTrack has welcomed these discussions, but some three and a half years on from the launch of these Principles, it is time to move onto implementation.”

Strengthening accountability

The new findings on lagging implementation will strengthen arguments from those who want to tweak or supplant the Guiding Principles. Some suggest, for instance, that the framework be changed to treat financial institutions differently from other sectors.

“[T]he financial sector requires an exceptional treatment when it comes to the application of the Guiding Principles,” the Center of Concern’s Caliari wrote last year in comments for the Working Group on Business and Human Rights.

“Financial companies, more than other companies, have the potential, with their change of behaviour, to influence the behaviour of other actors. That means they also should be upheld to a greater level of responsibility when they fail to do so.”

Caliari and others are also part of a movement to move beyond voluntary frameworks such as the Guiding Principles (at least in their current form), and instead to see through the creation of a binding mechanism.

This decades-long effort received a significant boost in June, when the U.N. Human Rights Council voted to allow negotiations to begin toward a binding treaty around transnational companies and their human rights obligations. (This same session also approved a popular second resolution, aimed instead at strengthening implementation of the Guiding Principles process.)

The new data on banks’ relative lack of compliance with the Guiding Principles, Caliari says, is one of the reasons the call for a legally binding treaty “has been gaining ground.”

He continues: “It is increasingly clear that mechanisms that rely on the consent of the companies cannot be the total of available accountability mechanisms. More is needed.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

Uwottyja children in the Amazon community of Samaria in Venezuela. Credit: Humberto Márquez/IPS

By Susan Bissell
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 14 2014 (IPS)

Next week marks 25 years since the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a historic commitment to children and the most widely accepted human rights treaty in history.

The CRC outlines universal rights for all children, including the right to health care, education, protection and the time and space to play. And it changed the way children are viewed, from objects that need care and charity, to human beings, with a distinct set of rights and with their own voices that deserve to be heard.Fresh in my mind right now are deadly bomb attacks on schools in northern Nigeria and Syria, Central American children braving perilous journeys to flee violence, children being recruited to fight in South Sudan and gang rapes in India.

My career with UNICEF began the same year the CRC was adopted, and I have seen profound progress in children’s lives. Since 1989 the number of children who die before their fifth birthday has been reduced by nearly half. Pregnant women are far more likely to receive antenatal care and a significantly higher proportion of children now go to school and have clean water to drink.

We must celebrate these important achievements.

But this anniversary must also be used to critically examine areas of children’s lives that have seen far less progress and acknowledge that millions of children have their fundamental rights violated every day.

Fresh in my mind right now are deadly bomb attacks on schools in northern Nigeria and Syria, Central American children braving perilous journeys to flee violence, children being recruited to fight in South Sudan and gang rapes in India.

These crises and events are stunning in their scope and depravity, and in the depth of suffering our children endure. As upsetting as they are, they play out alongside acts of violence against children that happen everywhere and every day.

Twenty-five years after the adoption of the CRC, we clearly must do more to protect our children.

Our children endure a cacophony of violence too often in silence, and too often under an unspoken assumption that violence against children is to some degree tolerable.

Our children endure it in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence of the long-lasting physical, psychological, emotional, and social consequences they suffer well into adulthood because of such violence.

Our children endure it in spite of most countries’ national laws and international law and despite 25 years of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Earlier this year UNICEF released the largest-ever global compilation of data on violence against children. The figures are staggering and provide indisputable evidence that violence against children is a global phenomenon, cutting across every geographic, ethnic, cultural, social and economic divide. The data shows violence against children is tolerated, even justified, by adults and by children themselves.

As we reflect on the last 25 years, we must also look forward and commit to doing things differently. Now, more than any other point in history, we have the knowledge and ability to protect our children, and with this ability comes the obligation to do so.

First, children need protection from the crises that play out in the public eye, like conflicts in Iraq, Syria, South Sudan and others.

We also need programmes that work at preventing and responding to the everyday, hidden violence. Initiatives like a programme in Turkey that reduced physical punishment of children by more than 70 percent in two years. Or child protection centres in Kenya that respond to thousands of cases every year. Or a safe schools programme in Croatia that cut the number of children being bullied in half.

Countries must also strengthen their child protection systems – networks of organisations, services, laws, and processes – that provide families with support so they can make sure children are protected.

And finally, as we approach the end of the Millennium Development Goals, world leaders must prioritise child protection as we look towards 2015 and beyond.

As a long-serving UNICEF official, and more importantly as a mother, I want for children everywhere what I want for my own daughter – a world where every child is protected from violence.

The 25th Anniversary of the Convention of the Rights of the Child provides an opportunity to recommit to the promise we made to children, and take the urgent action needed now to protect them from harm.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Children such as these are used as smugglers across the India-Bangladesh border. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 8 2014 (IPS)

Most of the world’s governments are taking measures to reduce the worst and most hazardous forms of child labour, according to a major report released here Tuesday by the U.S. Labour Department.

In its annual assessment of progress toward eliminating that kind of exploitation, the 958-page report found that roughly half of the 140-some countries and foreign territories covered by the report had made what it called “moderate” advances in the field.“I’m talking about children who carry huge loads on their backs and wield machetes on farms…who scavenge in garbage dumps and crawl in underground mine shafts." -- U.S. Labour Secretary Thomas Perez

Thirteen countries – most of them in Latin America — were found to have made “significant” progress in eliminating the worst forms of child labour during 2013 compared to the year before.

But another 13 nations and territories, notably the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela, were found to have made none at all.

“This report shines a light on children around the globe who are being robbed of their futures, who spend their days and often their nights engaged in some of the most gruelling work imaginable,” said U.S. Labour Secretary Thomas Perez, at the release of the ‘2013 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor’.

“I’m talking about children who carry huge loads on their backs and wield machetes on farms…who scavenge in garbage dumps and crawl in underground mine shafts searching for precious minerals from which someone else will profit,” he said. “Children with munitions strapped to their bodies, pressed into service as combatants in armed conflicts; children who are victims of trafficking or commercial sexual exploitation.”

The report, which consists mainly of specific profiles of the child labour situation and what national governments are doing about it in specific countries and territories that benefit under the U.S. Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) or other trade-boosting programmes, such as the Andean Trade Preference Act or the African Growth and Opportunities Act, has been mandated by Congress since 2002. The report also recommends steps governments can take to improve the situation.

It gains widespread praise from labour and child-welfare activist groups that use it as a way to raise public consciousness and as a source of pressure on foreign governments to do more to eliminate it.

While the Labour Department itself cannot take punitive action against unresponsive governments, the report can influence actions by other U.S. agencies, such as the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative that can, for example, reduce or eliminate trade benefits in cases of serious violations of international labour conventions.

“Overall, this report has been a fantastic tool for the advocacy community,” said Reid Maki of the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), which includes more than two dozen labour, church, consumer, and human rights groups. “It gives us something to measure progress each year and allows countries to compare their performance with others.”

“I think the report is a tremendous achievement,” Brian Campbell of the Washington-based International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) told IPS. He praised, in particular, its treatment of Uzbekistan, whose government has long been criticised for forcing school students to take part in the cotton harvest.

“They demonstrated a lot of courage …by making very clear that not only have children been taken out of school, but also that the whole system is based on forced labour by the government,” he said. “The challenge will be for the other U.S. government agencies to take on this analysis – including the Customs Service which is required to ban imports produced by forced labour.”

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) defines the “worst forms of child labour” as all forms of slavery, such as debt bondage, child trafficking, and forced recruitment of children in armed conflicts; the use of children for prostitution or pornography; their use of illicit activities, such as the production or trafficking of drugs; and “hazardous work” which, in turn is defined as any that “jeopardises the physical, mental or moral well-being” of a child.

According to ILO statistics, the number of children engaged in the worst forms of child labour or whose age is below the minimum prescribed by national law has fallen from about 246 million in 2000 to 168 million in 2012. The latter figure still accounts for roughly one in every 10 children from five to 18 years old worldwide.

The number of children engaged in “hazardous work” halved – from 170 million to 85 million – over the same period, according to the ILO.

The report divided countries into those where advances in eliminating the worst forms of child labour were “significant”, “moderate”, “minimal”, and none. Progress was assessed according to a number of criteria, including the enactment of laws, efforts at enforcement and co-ordination, the adoption of specific policies, and the implementation of social programmes designed to eliminate the problem, and encourage children to remain in school.

The 13 countries whose progress was deemed “significant” included Albania, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Ecuador, El Salvador, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uganda.

The CLC’s Maki, who also serves as the director of child labour advocacy at the National Consumers League, called the list “very encouraging.” “Most of these countries have had a lot of child labour problems in the past,” he told IPS.

He noted that “steady progress” had been made over the last several years, in particular. Since 2011, he said, the number of countries that had made “significant” progress had grown from two to 13, while the number with “moderate” advances had likewise increased from 47 to 72.

Conversely, the number of countries and territories with “minimal” or “no” progress has fallen from 82 to 50 – 20 of which were small islands, such as Anguilla, Barbados, Tonga, Tuvalu, and the Falkland/Malvinas Islands with small populations, Maki pointed out.

Besides the DRC, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, and Venezuela, the more-significant laggards in the “minimal” category included Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Serbia, South Sudan, Uruguay, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

One weakness of the report, according to ILRF’s Campbell was its failure to address how the private sector – including powerful multinational corporations — contributes to the worst forms of child labour.

“In the Malawi section, for example, the reports focuses at length what the government has done, but it doesn’t address the contract system of production of tobacco, as implemented by U.S. tobacco companies and their subsidiaries, which is a root cause of the child labour problem there,” he said.

“It’s largely because the Labour Department views its Congressional mandate as very limited; i.e., only what the governments are doing,” he said. “I think they could interpret the scope of the report to include other issues, such as the business practices of companies and how they also contribute to the problem.”

But Maki was more reserved. “If you expand the scope of the report to the business world,” he said, “you might muddy things enough to let the governments off the hook.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

NGOs and government data suggests that a child goes missing every eight minutes in India. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India , Sep 4 2014 (IPS)

In a country where well over half the population lives on less than two dollars a day, it takes a lot to shock people. The sight of desperate families traveling in search of money and food, whole communities defecating in the open, old women performing back-breaking labour, all this is simply part of life in India, home to 1.2 billion people.

But amidst this rampant destitution, some things still raise red flags, or summon collective cries of fury. Child trafficking is one such issue, and it is earning front-page headlines in states where thousands of children are believed to be victims of the illicit trade.

The arrest on Jun. 5 of Shakeel Ahamed, a 40-year-old migrant labourer, by police in the southern state of Kerala, created a national outcry, and reawakened fears of a complex and deep-rooted child trafficking network around the country.

Ahamed’s operation alone was thought to involve over 580 children being illegally moved into Muslim orphanages throughout the state.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children. Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. Gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children." -- Justice J B Koshy, chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission
Experts tell IPS that children are also routinely trafficked to and from states like Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), child trafficking is rampant in underdeveloped villages, where “victims are lured or abducted from their homes and subsequently forced to work against their wish through various means in various establishments, indulge in prostitution or subjected to various types of indignitiesand even killed or incapacitated for the purposes of begging, and trade in human organs.”

Available records show a total of 3,554 crimes related to human trafficking in 2012, compared to 3,517 the previous year. Some 2,848 and 3,400 cases were reported in 2009 and 2010 respectively, as well as 3,029 cases in 2008.

In 2012, former State Home Affairs Minister Jitendra Singh told the upper house of parliament that almost 60,000 children were reported as “missing” in 2011. “Of those,” he added, “more than 22,000 are yet to be located.”

It is not clear how many of these “missing” children are victims of traffickers; a dearth of national data means that experts and advocates are often left guessing at the root causes of the problem.

NGOs and government agencies often cite contradictory figures, but both are agreed that a child goes missing roughly every eight minutes in the country.

Human rights watchdogs say there are many contributing factors to child trafficking in India, including economic deprivation. Indeed, the 2013 Global Hunger Index ranked India 63^rd out of 78 countries, adding that 21.3 percent of the population went hungry in 2013. According to the World Bank, 68.3 percent of Indians live on less than two dollars a day.

“Socio-economic backwardness is a key factor in child trafficking,” Justice J B Koshy, former chief justice of the Patna High Court and chairperson of the Kerala Human Rights Commission, told IPS, adding that a political-mafia nexus also fueled the practice in remote parts of the country.

“Many families are unable to afford the basic necessities of life, which forces parents to sell their children,” Koshy stated. “Some children are abandoned by families who can’t take care of them. Some run away to escape abuse or unhappy homes. The gangsters and middlemen approach these vulnerable children. In some cases, good-looking girls are taken away by force.”

An action research study conducted in 2005 by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) found that a majority of trafficking victims belonged to socially deprived sections of society.

It is estimated that half of the children trafficked within India are between the ages of 11 and 14.

Some 32.3 percent of trafficked girls suffer from diseases such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and other gynaecological problems, according to a 2006 report by ECPAT International.

This is likely due to the fact that most girls are trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation.

A government-commissioned study conducted in 2003, the last time comprehensive data was gathered, estimated that the number of sex workers increased from two million in 1997 to three million in 2003-04, representing a 50-percent rise.

Many of these sex workers are thought to be girls between the ages of 12 and 15.

Sreelekha Nair, a researcher who was worked with the New Delhi-based Centre for Women’s Studies, added that parents coming from poor socio-economic conditions in remote villages sometimes readily hand over their children to middlemen.

Some parents have been found to “sell their children for amounts that are shockingly worthless,” she told IPS, in some cases for as little as 2,000 rupees (about 33 dollars), adding, “law and order agencies cannot often intervene in the private matters of a family.”

Rajnath Singh, home minister of India, told a group of New Delhi-based activists headed by Annie Raja, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Women, that a central agency would conduct a probe into the mass trafficking of children from villages in the Gumla district of the eastern state of Jharkhand over the past several years.

The group had brought it to the attention of the minister that thousands of girls were going missing from interior villages in the district every year, while their parents claimed ignorance as to their whereabouts.

Raja told reporters in New Delhi this past Julythat developmental schemes launched by individual states and the central government often fail to reach remote villages, leaving the countryside open to agents attempting to “sneak teenage girls out of villages.”

Experts point out that implementation of the 1986 Immoral Traffic Prevention Act remains weak. Many believe that since the act only refers to trafficking for the purpose of prostitution, it does not provide comprehensive protection for children, nor does it provide a clear definition of the term ‘trafficking’.

Dr. P M Nair, project coordinator of the anti-human trafficking unit of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in New Delhi and former director general of police, said that investigations should focus on recruiters, traffickers and all those who are part of organised crime.

The ‘scene of crime’ in a trafficking case, he said, should not be confined to the place of exploitationbut should also cover places of transit and recruitment.

“Victims of trafficking should never be prosecuted or stigmatised,” he told IPS. “They should be extended all care and attention from the human rights perspective. There is a need for the mandatory involvement of government agencies in the post-rescue process so that appropriate rehabilitation measures are ensured” as quickly as possible, he added.

NGOs like Child Line India Foundation help provide access to legal, medical and counseling services to all trafficked victims in order to restore confidence and self-esteem, but the country lacks a coordinated national policy to deal with the issue at the root level.

Experts have recommended that the state provide education, or gender-sensitive market-driven vocational training to rescued victims, to help them reintegrate into society, but such schemes are yet to become a reality.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

A sand quarry Rhonda, Nakuru County, Kenya. Many of Kenya’s youth engaged in the industry, despite the deadly risks posed by collapsing mining walls due to poor sand harvesting methods. Credit: Robert Kibet/IPS

By Robert Kibet
NAKURU COUNTY, Kenya, Aug 6 2014 (IPS)

Allan Karanja, 22, is a sand harvester. His job is a complex and arduous one that involves him working in deep pits, equipped only with a shovel, crowbar and no protective gear, as he mines sand. It’s also a deadly occupation.

In Rhonda area, situated south of Nakuru town and next to Lake Nakuru National Park, in Kenya’s Rift Valley Region, is an area characterised by sprawling ramshackle settlements. Here hundreds of youth engage in sand mining, with the Ndarugu River, which flows into Lake Nakuru National Park, being the main site of sand harvesting.

Karanja tells IPS he’s seen many of the workers around him die when weakened steep walls collapse in the midst of excavation.

“Hunger is what drives us into these sand mines. We earn peanuts here despite the risks we undergo. We excavate sand without safety helmets,” Karanja says.

In 2010, Nakuru town, situated 160 km north-west of Kenya’s capital city Nairobi, was voted by United Nations Human Settlements Programme or U.N.-Habitat as the fastest-growing town in East and Central Africa. The new title resulted in a rush of investors to the area and a subsequent boom in construction industry – the main consumers of sand.

Rhonda is the leading source of sand in the entire Rift Valley Region, owing to its availability along the river bank. Here, sand mining dates back to the early 1980s.

Jackson Kemboi is an owner of a two-hectare sand quarry where two sand harvesters died when a wall collapsed last month. A father and son died when a wall collapsed killing them on the spot, which prompted Kemboi to close temporarily.

He tells IPS that sand mining in Rhonda provides employment to close to 3,000 people.

“This quarry has been in existence since the early 1980s. We do not have the capacity to employ those excavating sand on a monthly salary basis since as the owner I have to share the amount earned per seven-tonne lorry with all involved. These young men come on daily basis, engage in scooping and loading of sand and get their wage at the end of the day,” Kemboi says.

Kemboi says he charges Ksh. 5,000 (58 dollars) per seven-tonne truck of sand, with 20 percent of that sum being shared among sand miners, loaders and truck drivers as wages.

Jack Omare, a father of two, tells IPS he has been working on Kemboi’s sand mine since 1992. He says he’s escaped death thrice. The worst incident, he says, was when weak sand walls collapsed, pushing him and the truck driver into the Ndarugu River. Luckily, they both survived.

During the same month three others died when a wall collapsed in Kirinyaga of Meru County, Eastern Kenya.

Omare says on a normal day he earns a minimum of Ksh. 300 (three dollars). It’s a meagre amount, just enough to provide a meal for him, his wife and children.

Sand, a Burgeoning Industry

But sand in Kenya is becoming a necessary component in fuelling the construction boom that is driving the rapid pace of urbanisation and rapid economic growth patterns in Kenya.

The Kenya Economic Report 2013 by the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis predicted that the economy would grow by about 5.5 percent in 2013 and 6.3 percent in 2014, compared to 4.6 percent in 2012.

Anne Waiguru, a cabinet secretary in the Ministry of Devolution and Planning, tells IPS that Kenya’s urban population is growing at four percent per annum. It’s a situation, she says, that can be attributed to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence as well as youth migrating from rural to urban areas in search of jobs.

But many of Kenya’s poor youth are turning to sand mining as a quick way of earning money, despite the deadly risks posed by collapsing mine walls due to poor sand harvesting methods.

And Karanja is among many youth facing exploitation in the industry.

According to Mary Muthoni, an official with local government child welfare, close to 3,000 youth, most of whom are under age, are involved in some of the worst forms of labour here, including sand mining.

An official with Kenya’s Child Welfare Society, a government agency, tells IPS that youth engaged in mining are exposed to toxic materials, which increase their chances of developing respiratory diseases.

Karanja says: “At 14, I would opt to miss classes at Kaptembwa primary school to go of loading sand into trucks to enable me purchase basic school items.” He quit school and did not even go to high school.

Environmental Degradation

In 2013, the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) ordered the closure of all sand mines in Nakuru as it emerged that mining was contributing to environmental degradation.

Sand mining in Nakuru, according to NEMA, has contributed to the siltation in River Ndarugu and also poses a threat to nearby public utilities and infrastructure such as roads and schools.

“The ban remains active. As an authority, we have no problem with effecting the law but we are considering lives of thousands of the youth who would remain jobless,” Wilfred Osumo, Nakuru’s NEMA director, tells IPS.

He says those who want to continue with the business, especially quarry owners, are required to apply for an environmental impact assessment license issued by NEMA at a cost of 0.1 percent of total project cost.

NEMA’s 2007 National Sand Harvesting Guideline stipulates that sand harvesting or scooping is restricted to river beds with no harvesting allowed on riverbanks to avoid widening of rivers.

“Sand harvesting in Rift Valley is done along the river beds, which is of poor quality as compared to earth sand mining in parts of Eastern Kenya namely Machakos, Kitui and Makueni,” Professor Jackson Kitetu, an environmental scientist specialising in sand harvesting research in Kabarak University, tells IPS.

His research study between 1993 and 1997 revealed that sand harvesting in Eastern Kenya provided jobs to 30,000 people.

And despite the risks associated with it, people will continue engaging in the industry.

Mike Mwangi, a licensed driver on the sand mines, tells IPS that it is his preferred source of income despite the challenges.

“I tried hawking fruits in the Nakuru town CBD but was frustrated by municipality officials. I had to quit and get back to this deadly job, sand harvesting,” he tells IPS.

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted at kibetesq@gmail.com or on twitter @Kibet_88

Julio T is a 15-year-old vendor of handcrafted costume jewellery in Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, near the FIFA Fan Fest. He says sales are good during the World Cup because there are a lot of tourists. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 24 2014 (IPS)

The FIFA World Cup being played in Brazil has sounded a warning for organisations fighting exploitation of children and adolescents, during an event that has attracted 3.7 million tourists to the 12 host cities.

As well as revenue, business and employment opportunities, the football World Cup also increases the risks of labour and sexual exploitation of children under 16, according to social organisations and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“We do not have statistics to quantify the problem, but factors surrounding the World Cup create more vulnerability to exploitation” among children and adolescents, Flora Werneck, the coordinator of Childhood Brasil, told IPS.

The wave of tourists between Jun. 12 and Jul. 13 in the cities where FIFA (International Association Football Federation) World Cup matches are being played has multiplied temporary demand for services and increased child labour and the vulnerability of children’s rights, Werneck said.

Childhood Brasil has been combating sexual abuse in this Latin American country for the past 15 years.

In Werneck’s view, the fast pace of construction and infrastructure projects for the World Cup created dramatic growth in temporary jobs, migrant workers and family evictions, and the school holidays are now another risk factor.

Children and teenagers may be coerced into illegal activities like selling drugs and child prostitution. “They are more exposed to these and other risks,” Werneck said.

Violations of children’s rights are exacerbated by social factors that increase vulnerability, such as inequality, poverty, lack of access to education, consumerism and the culture of machismo, said Werneck and other experts consulted by IPS.

The sexual exploitation of children related to major sporting events is a problem that has been silenced and neglected by public policies.

A 2013 study carried out by Brunel University, in London, commissioned by Childhood Brasil in association with the Oak Foundation , pointed to factors determining increased numbers of cases of violence against children, due to the existence of “significant risks” to children around major sporting events.

In addition to this year’s World Cup, Rio de Janeiro will host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.

The lack of data measuring the magnitude of the risks does not mean these do not exist, the study says. “We should not assume that no data = no problem,” it states.

The experts consulted say that there is a profound lack of data related to child exploitation in Brazil. The figures that exist are from the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency’s rights abuse hotline “Disque Denúncia Nacional” (Dial 100).

In 2013 the hotline received more than 120,000 denunciations of violations of children’s rights.

Five of the 12 states that are hosting matches in this World Cup are at the top of the list for child abuse complaints: São Paulo (17,990), Rio de Janeiro (15,635), Bahia (10,957), Minas Gerais (9,565) and Rio Grande do Sul (6,269).

“No child should suffer because a football stadium is built, nor should they be victims of exploitation through sex tourism. There are no firm data that can prove that mega events are related to a rise in child abuse,” Alessandro Pinto, the coordinator in Brazil of the Save the Dream campaign, told IPS.

But, he said, “we are here to watch this phenomenon closely in Brazil for the next two years.”

Save the Dream is a joint initiative of the International Centre for Sport Security (ICSS) and the Qatar Olympic Committee.  Pinto said that the campaign will attempt to gather concrete data about the link between mega sporting events and violence against children until the 2016 Olympics.

“Sport has a great responsibility towards human beings, society and human rights,” said Pinto.

On Jun. 20 Pinto took part in an event to publicise the preliminary results of the Proteja Brasil (Protect Brazil) campaign against sexual exploitation of children, under the auspices of UNICEF and the Brazilian government in the framework of the World Cup.

One of the strategies to encourage reporting acts of violence against children was the creation of an application that can be downloaded free to smartphones and tablets. The Protect Brazil app is an unprecedented initiative worldwide, said Ideli Salvatti, the minister of the Human Rights Secretariat.

The app aims to make use of the more than 70 million cell phones in Brazil, a country of over 200 million people, to spread reporting of child abuse. It is available in Portuguese, English and Spanish.

Casimira Benge, chief of UNICEF’s child protection programme in Brazil, said that as Brazil is a country of mega events, violence against its 56 million children and adolescents is also on a large scale.

“We learned a lot from the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Children had no classes because the schools closed during the championship, and so they were left unsupervised. Here in Brazil we are working to provide accompaniment and support for children, even during the school holidays,” Benge told IPS.

Since the launch of the online app on May 18 until Jun. 20, it has been downloaded 60,000 times and 3,800 telephone calls were made to child protection agencies. According to UNICEF, in just one month the campaign reached 40 million people.

Analysis of reports to the Dial 100 hotline found that nearly 50 percent of victims were female, 60 percent were Afro-Brazilian, and victims of violence were mainly aged 8-14, with 65 percent of the aggressors belonging to their immediate family.

Sexual violence ranked in fourth place among the Dial 100 complaints in 2013, at 26 percent. In 2012, when there were over 130,000 reports, one-third of them were related to sexual violence.

In Benge’s view, the best strategy against violence is prevention and enabling reporting of incidents.

Sexual violence is classified in two categories, she said: domestic abuse of a minor, like statutory rape, and sexual exploitation for profit, like prostitution. In 2013 there were 28,552 reports of abuse and 10,664 of sexual exploitation.

Benge said cities in the north and northeast of Brazil, like Manaus and Ceará, deserve special attention because they are more vulnerable.

“There must be vigilance in all 12 host cities, but greater attention must be paid to those with a higher incidence,” she said.

Since the FIFA World Cup began there have been no reports of arrests in the host cities for offences of this nature, but two weeks beforehand the police closed two venues in Rio de Janeiro, allegedly for child sex exploitation.

11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale works 12-hour shifts at a car-repair shop in Somalia’s capital Mogadishu. Credit:Alinoor Salad/IPS

By Muhyadin Ahmed Roble
NAIROBI/MOGADISHU, May 17 2014 (IPS)

Twelve-year-old Halima Mohamed Ali wakes up every morning at five am, but unlike her peers she does not go to school. Instead, she begins her duties as a nanny for five children, the oldest of whom is just two years younger than she is.

She starts off by making breakfast, then wakes the children and washes and dresses them in time for school or madrassa, institutions of religious instruction.

War and famine in Somalia have forced Halima, and thousands of others like herself, to abandon the dream of education and become workers instead. UNICEF statistics from 2011, the last time such data was collected, show that half of all children between the ages of five and 14 hailing from the country’s central and southern regions are employed.

In Puntland and Somaliland, which have been more stable than other parts of Somalia for the past two decades, more than a quarter of all children work for a living.

The grueling jobs for which they are hired – mostly manual and domestic labour – pay little but demand a lot.

Halima says she works from “sunrise to sunrise”, cooking, ironing, washing floors, bathing the children, and finally putting them to bed before calling it a day. “It is a very stressful job,” confessed the girl, who has never set foot in a classroom.

She’d love to shirk her duties and bury her nose in a book, but her 50-dollar monthly salary is a lifeline for her family of five, who have no other breadwinner.

Surrounded by her mother and young sisters on one of her rare half-days off, Ali told IPS, “If I miss even a single day of work, my family will go to bed hungry.”

It is a tremendous burden for a child, but compared to the hardships the Ali family has endured, sending young Halima off to work is not the end of the world.

Originally hailing from the Dinsor district in Somalia’s southern Bay region, located about 266 km from the capital Mogadishu, the family fled the deadly famine in 2011, narrowly missing becoming statistics along with the nearly quarter of a million pastoralists who starved to death as a fierce drought consumed the countryside and resulted in hundreds of thousands of livestock deaths.

When they finally reached Mogadishu, the family took shelter in a makeshift camp called Badbaado, which means ‘salvation’ in Somali, along with 50,000 others refugees.

At first, the camp’s occupants received food rations, shelter and medical assistance, Ali said, but when the United Nations declared an end to the famine in February 2012, the flow of aid slowed to a trickle. Few of the displaced have been able to find work – lacking formal education and possessing no skills beyond the ability to farm or rear livestock, they have turned to the only option open to them: sending the children out to make a living however they can.

Though Halima is exhausted at the end of her 17-hour workday, she is glad of the chance to provide for her family.

Her story echoes those of countless others in the East African nation, according to Mohamed Abdi, programme manager of Somali Peace Line, an organisation that promotes and protects the rights of children.

“Hundreds of girls are brought to Mogadishu from rural areas where there is [extreme] poverty and famine conditions … to work as domestic servants in middle-class homes. They work long hours for food, lodging and low wages, which they send back to their families,” Abdi told IPS over the phone from the capital.

“Lucky ones” like Ali get paid on a regular basis, Abdi said; many others have their meagre salaries withheld for months, are cut off from their families, abused and treated like slaves.

He strongly believes that the on-going violence across Somalia, caused by the outbreak of civil war in 1991, will ensure a steady stream of child labourers, as desperate families lose jobs, and hope.

“When we try to convince parents not to send their children to work, they ask us for alternative sources of income, which we cannot provide,” he admitted.

Citing a human development report released in 2012 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Abdi said more than 70 percent of the population of 10.2 million are classified as “low-income”, with 73 percent of all Somalis living on less than two dollars a day.

The unemployment rate is one of the highest in the world, with 54 percent of all Somalis between the ages of 15 and 64 out of work.

Little Hands, Low Wages

In addition to being vulnerable to informal labour conditions such as long hours, children like 11-year-old Hassan Abdullahi Duale also receive lower wages than their adult counterparts, even when they perform all the same functions.

When his father was killed in a suicide bomb blast in Mogadishu two years ago, Duale – the only boy in the family – left school and took a job in a car-repair centre where he works 12-hour days to support his mother and two young sisters.

Dressed in his ‘uniform’ of an oil-soaked Arsenal T-shirt and matching shorts, Duale tells IPS that his uncle got him this job so his family would be able to eat. Though he is tempted to quit and go back to school, he feels responsible for his family.

With the idea of formal education a distant memory, his only hope is to make a career as a mechanic. For now, however, he is paid far less than his co-workers, and is sometimes even forced to do their jobs without earning a single extra coin for his efforts.

“On a good day, when there are lots of cars to fix, I earn 50 Somali shillings (about 2.5 dollars) a day. On bad days, I am just given my lunch and sent home with nothing,” said Duale, sweat dripping down his face.

“The adults earn about 150 shillings (roughly 7.5 dollars) each day, and sometimes they take my earnings by force. There’s nothing I can do and no-one to complain to, so I just wait for the next working day,” he added.

The director-general of Somalia’s ministry of human development and public services, Aweys Sheikh Haddad, said his country’s constitution bans child labour, adding that the government recently ratified an International Labour Organization (ILO) convention forbidding the worst forms of child labour.

But challenges in law enforcement mean these commitments on paper have not amounted to much in practice. Various studies and reports have found children as young as five years old engaged in virtually every industry, from construction to agriculture.

In addition to their exploitation for military purposes – operating checkpoints, becoming suicide bombers or taking up arms, for instance – children all across southern Somalia can also be seen working on the streets, washing cars, shining shoes and selling khat, a plant that contains an amphetamine-like stimulant.

“The government believes that making education more accessible to the children can help to eliminate child labour and we are in the process of [implementing] such programmes aimed to bring more children back to school,” Haddad told IPS.

“We have launched the ‘Go-2-School’ initiative, which aims to provide one million children with free education,” he added. However, these plans have yet to bear fruit: according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), only 710,860 youth out of 1.7 million primary school-aged children are enrolled in any kind of education.

Without a drastic interruption of the vicious cycles that perpetuate child labour, the future looks bleak for Somalia’s youth.

A family living in an urban slum in Sonagachi, Kolkata, India. Credit: UN Photo/Kibae Park

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

Four hundred million children under 13 years of age are living in extreme poverty worldwide, according to a new study released by the World Bank here Thursday.

That total constitutes fully one-third of the 1.2 billion people still living on less than the equivalent of 1.25 dollars a day, according to the report.

“All but three countries in the world have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees some access to basic social services for children, including basic social protection,” Jeffrey O’Malley, director of policy and strategy for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS. “The scale of children living in extreme poverty shows how far we are from fulfilling those rights.

“But it’s also important because, beyond the needs and rights of those children, their families, communities, and countries won’t reach their development potential, if the children don’t benefit from adequate food, nutrition, water, health care – all of which are essential to their intellectual and physical development into productive adults,” he said.

Indeed, the report found that half of all people living in absolute poverty in the world’s 35 poorest countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia – are 12 years old or less.

“Children should not be cruelly condemned to a life without hope, without good education, and without access to quality health care. We must do better for them,” the Bank’s president, Jim Yong Kim, said at a press conference here on the eve of the annual meetings here of the Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Later this week, Kim will host a special event with Malala Yousafzai, who was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize Thursday and is considered a favourite for winning the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. He said the 16-year-old Pakistani school girl and education activist was a “powerful symbol of hope” for the 400 million children who remain in extreme poverty.

“She would not be denied,” he said in a reference to her continuing fight for girls’ education before and after the 2012 attempt on her life by Taliban gunmen in Pakistan’s SwatValley and subsequent threats against her after her recovery.

His remarks came as the IMF’s managing director, Christine Lagarde, announced that it had received sufficient authorisation from its membership to transfer profits it made from sales of part of its gold holdings to its Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT), a fund to provide no-interest loans to low-income countries.

“We now have secured critical resources to provide adequate levels of financial support to the poorest countries for years to come,” she said.

Eighty percent of the IMF’s member states agreed to transfer their share of the profits to the PRGT which will permit the facility to lend an average of 1.92 billion dollars a year to its clients.

The announcement was hailed by anti-poverty groups who have long campaigned for the IMF to use its gold sales to aid low-income countries. Oxfam called it “great news, especially in these difficult financial times.”

“We’re excited that the profits are going into zero-percent lending, which essentially qualifies as debt relief for some of the poorest countries,” Jubilee USA director Eric LeCompte told IPS.

“That’s money that can go back into social protections for the poorest – most of whom are women and children — in their countries,” he said. “There’s no doubt that even a few billion dollars can go a long way to addressing extreme poverty.”

Since assuming the Bank presidency in July 2012, Kim has repeatedly stressed that the reduction of extreme poverty should be the institution’s top priority. Earlier this year, he set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty by the year 2030, along with promoting greater equity by increasing income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population in developing countries.

Unveiling a major re-organisation of the Bank Wednesday, he set an interim goal of reducing global poverty levels to nine percent by 2020, which would mean increasing incomes of an additional 510 million people to greater than USD 1.25 a day in real terms.

The new report, entitled “The State of the Poor”, is being billed by the Bank as the first effort to provide an in-depth profile of the world’s poorest people who pose the greatest challenge to meeting those goals.

While reductions in extreme poverty in the developing world between 1981 and 2010 have been remarkable, according to the report, most of the progress has been confined to middle-income countries.

Increasing incomes among the poorest in low-income countries (LICs), on the other hand, has proved far more difficult. Indeed, the number of poor people in LICs actually increased by 103 million during the same period.

Indeed, after India, about one third of whose population lives in absolute poverty, LICs contain most of the world’s poorest — 29 percent in 2010. In 1981, the same countries accounted for only 13 percent of the world’s total, according to the report.

As to who the world’s poorest are, the study found that over 78 percent of the absolute poor in the developing world live in rural areas, a significantly higher percent than the 58 percent of the total developing-country population who are rural-dwellers.

Moreover, 63 percent of the absolute poor work in agriculture, mostly in small-holder farming.

The study also found a gender gap in education among those living in extreme poverty. Poor women aged 15 to 30, on average, have a year less schooling than poor men of the same age group.

But extreme poverty rates were found to be highest among children under 13 – 33 percent in the developing world as a whole and 50 percent in the LICs.

Not surprisingly in that connection, the study also found that the average number of prime-age adults available to provide income and support per child in non-poor households in developing countries was three. That was more than twice the number found in poor households where there was an average of only 1.4 adults per child.

Giving in to sustained international pressure, authoritarian Uzbekistan is opening up its cotton fields to international monitors this fall.

The International Labour Organisation has confirmed to EurasiaNet.org that it is sending a mission to monitor the Uzbek cotton harvest, which starts in mid-September.“It is in these [Western] capitals’ long-term interests to drive a harder, more public, bargain with Tashkent over its abysmal record.” -- Steve Swerdlow of HRW

“The ILO will be involved in the monitoring of the cotton harvest in Uzbekistan with the aim of preventing the use of child labour,” spokesman Hans von Rohland confirmed by email on Sep. 12. Monitoring will start “in the next few days”.

Uzbekistan has been the target in recent years of international criticism and a widespread commercial boycott over its reliance on child and forced labour to reap the cash crop. Earlier this year, the U.S. State Department assailed Uzbekistan on the forced labour issue.

The surprise news that an observer mission is being allowed into Uzbekistan – which has always denied the use of systematic state-sponsored child and forced labour, but resisted years of pressure to invite monitors in – has received a cautious welcome from watchdog groups. Nevertheless, labour rights advocates are concerned that the ILO’s mandate will not go far enough to stamp out abuses in the cotton fields.

“We are pleased that this year the International Labour Organization expects to deploy teams to Uzbekistan to monitor during the harvest,” the Cotton Campaign, a coalition lobbying for improved standards in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry, said on Sep. 9.

“We remain concerned that the ILO monitors will be accompanied by representatives of the Government of Uzbekistan and the official state union and employers’ organizations, whose presence will have a chilling effect on Uzbek citizens’ willingness to speak openly with the ILO monitors,” the Cotton Campaign statement added.

Von Rohland, the ILO spokesman, confirmed that the mission “involves cooperation with the Uzbek authorities who have the mandate to deal with child labour issues, as well as with experts from employers’ organisations and trade unions.”

Uzbek participants will receive ILO training aimed at “ensuring that the monitoring is credible and reliable,” the representative added. One goal “is increasing awareness and building up the capacity of national actors to ensure the full respect of the provisions of ratified Conventions.”

Uzbekistan has ratified two ILO conventions on child labour, but human rights activists say Tashkent routinely flouts them.

Campaigners are concerned that the observers will not gain unfettered access to the cotton fields. “It is essential that monitoring teams be comprised only of independent observers and not include any Uzbek officials,” Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, told EurasiaNet.org.

Access without minders is essential to allow labourers to speak freely, he said, since “the Uzbek government has a well-documented record of suppressing all forms of dissent.”

Activists are also concerned that the ILO’s remit covers child labour, but not forced labour, although Uzbekistan has signed ILO forced labour conventions which would provide a legal basis to monitor it.

“The mission’s mandate should explicitly include forced labour as the entire system of the cotton harvest as it affects millions of Uzbeks rests on a state-sponsored system of coercion,” Swerdlow said.

The ILO representative countered that “the monitoring will look at child labour, including forced child labour, and important aspects of forced labour are bound to come up.”

The Cotton Campaign has already documented cases of forced labour during harvest preparations.

“During the spring 2013, Government authorities mobilized children and adults to plough and weed, and authorities beat farmers for planting onions instead of cotton,” it reported. In summer it documented “preparations to coercively mobilize nurses, teachers and other public sector workers to harvest cotton.”

Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest rests on forced labour to help farmers meet government-set quotas to pick the crop. Forced labourers can buy their way out: The going rate this year is 400,000 sums (200 dollars at the official exchange rate, or five times the minimum wage), according to the Uzmetronom.com website. Cotton pickers are paid a pittance: the rate was 150-200 sums (7-10 cents) per kilo last year, Uzmetronom said.

For Tashkent the crop, dubbed “white gold”, is a cash cow. Uzbekistan is the world’s fifth largest producer and second largest exporter of cotton, data from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) shows. Cotton accounted for 11 percent of Uzbekistan’s export earnings in 2011, according to a report by the Responsible Sourcing Network lobby group.

Uzbekistan has been the target of a sustained campaign over child labour, which two years ago embarrassingly led to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of strongman president Islam Karimov and a fashion designer, being barred from New York Fashion Week.

A pledge organised by the Responsible Sourcing Network “to ensure that forced child and adult labour [in Uzbekistan] does not find its way into our products” has been signed by 131 retailers, including big-name brands like Nike and Adidas Group.

In the face of this barrage of negative publicity, Uzbekistan moved to keep younger children out of the cotton fields last year – “a hopeful reminder that pressure sometimes works, even on governments with records as authoritarian as Tashkent,” Swerdlow said.

However, a report by HRW found that this simply shifted the onus to adults and older children.

Campaigners have long accused Western governments of turning a blind eye to Tashkent’s human rights abuses due to strategic considerations. Uzbekistan sits astride the Northern Distribution Network, a key transportation route into and out of Afghanistan which is assuming fresh importance as NATO troops withdraw by the end of 2014.

Nevertheless, activists say Western governments should set aside geopolitics and seize the moment to ramp up pressure on the Uzbek government.

“It is in these [Western] capitals’ long-term interests to drive a harder, more public, bargain with Tashkent over its abysmal record,” said Swerdlow. “Ultimately, an Uzbekistan that continues to be plagued by such a wide spectrum of serious abuses risks a worse, more explosive type of instability for the country, its 30 million people, and the wider region.”

Editor’s note: Joanna Lillis is a freelance writer who specialises in Central Asia. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Aboudi, 12, spends his evenings selling flowers outside Beirut's bars. His parents are stuck in his war-torn hometown Aleppo in Syria. Credit: Sam Tarling/IPS.

By Zak Brophy
BEIRUT, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

With Lebanon fraying at the seams under pressure from the neighbouring Syria conflict and the economy stuttering amid a political vacuum, more and more children are being pushed into labour.  

There are no concrete statistics, but the ministry of labour has raised its 2006 estimate of 100,000 child workers in the country to 180,000.

The real figure is “significantly higher” due to the extraordinary circumstances of the past two years, head of the ministry’s child labour unit Nazha Shallita told IPS. Lebanon has a population of 4.2 million.

“As Lebanon struggles to deal with the huge influx of Syrian refugees, along with a general decline in the economic and security situation in the country, not to mention the absence of a government, we are witnessing more and more children being forced into work,” Hayat Osseiran, a Lebanon-based consultant for the International Labour Organisation and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, told IPS.

On any given night in central Beirut young children can be seen wandering among the city’s revellers selling roses or gardenia necklaces until the early hours. While the swelling numbers of street children hawking everything from flowers to tissues are perhaps the most visible and commonly encountered form of child labour, they are just the tip of the iceberg.“I thought that work would be better for me than school but I made a mistake. School is better than work. I really regret so much that I left school but it is too late now.” -- child labourer, Haydar

“This work is hard and I don’t like it but I have to do it for the family,” said 11-year-old Jihad as he carried a bunch of cheap plastic roses to tout outside a popular Beirut bar. “If my mum and my dad and my brother could make it here I would be able to go back to school but they are stuck in Aleppo and can’t come to join me.”

The legions of children working Lebanon’s streets have grown considerably with the arrival over the past couple of years of tens of thousands of impoverished and destitute Syrian families uprooted by the brutal civil war back home. However, the problem was around before the Syria crisis and often has a more sinister undertone than impoverished children hustling on the streets to support hard up families.

“Many of these kids are not just flower sellers, they are put to work selling many things and they are organised by criminal gangs,” lawyer and child rights activist Khaled Merheb told IPS. “There is a bus that brings them and then at the end of the night it comes and collects them.”

The Internal Security Forces (ISF) is responsible for policing the exploitation of street children but concede there is little they can do without proper referral mechanisms to keep the children off the streets.

There is one centre in the country for street children picked up by the ISF but it offers virtually no rehabilitation services, is chronically under-funded and is unable to keep children in its custody if a relative asks for their release – even if it is believed the family member is exploiting the child.

The ISF could offer no statistics on the number of adults charged with exploiting street children, while also acknowledging that criminal gangs mastermind much of this work. Children complain frequently of mistreatment by the ISF, said Merheb. And virtually all cases against adults who put children to work “don’t go to court.”

Beyond those children hawking on the street, tens of thousands of youngsters are getting drawn away from education into work – and work is not just a few shifts at the corner store for pocket money, or a summer job to bolster the CV.

Child labour often exposes children to physical, sexual or psychological abuse, deprives them of the right to education, and endangers their health, safety and morals. Children are working on factory floors, in brothels, machinery workshops, tobacco fields and rubbish dumps.

Lebanon is signatory to a number of international treaties on child labour and has taken some steps in changing its national laws and policies to bring itself in line with its obligations. Foremost among these was the raising of the minimum age in 1996 for working children from nine to 14 years, and 15 years in industrial projects and for activities which are physically demanding or detrimental to health.

The laws exist but there is virtually no monitoring on the ground. The ministry of labour has a team of about 70 inspectors across the country. However, a recent pilot project by the Dutch NGO War Child found that of the 19 inspectors it worked with, none were aware that it was their responsibility to investigate child labour, nor were they even aware of the child labour unit within the ministry.

On a street corner in one of Beirut’s impoverished slums a group of youngsters between the ages of 12 and 15 have all dropped out of school. They hold jobs ranging from packing rat poison to cleaning aluminium workshops. They typically work six days a week for eight to 12 hours a day for up to only 60 dollars a week.

“I thought that work would be better for me than school but I made a mistake. School is better than work. I really regret so much that I left school but it is too late now,” said Haydar, one of the youngsters in the group.

High dropout rates, especially in neglected areas, are a major problem. A law passed in 1998 set down free and compulsory education until the age of 12, but has never been put into effect.

“Education is neither free nor compulsory in many communities,” Lala Arabia, executive manager and protection coordinator for the Insaan Organisation that works with street children, told IPS. “Oftentimes families are simply told we don’t have enough places. How can that be compulsory? This is especially true for non-Lebanese.”

Many of the poverty stricken areas of Lebanon have long endured neglect from a weak and fractured state. Now with the political and security situation deteriorating amid a growing refugee crisis, more and more of children are slipping through the cracks.

There are an estimated 165,000 domestic child labourers in Nepal. Credit: Mallika Aryal/IPS

By Mallika Aryal
KATHMANDU, Jul 25 2013 (IPS)

Last December, Pradeep Dongol, child protection officer at the Kathmandu-based Children and Women in Social Service and Human Rights (CWISH), received an urgent call from one of the NGO’s many offices in Nepal’s sprawling capital city.

Dongol rushed over to find an 11-year-old girl in the care of a CWISH staff member: her eyes were sunken, her hands covered in wounds, and she had lost patches of hair from her head.

He later learned that she had escaped from the house where she was working because she could no longer “bear…all the abuse.”

Reema (not her real name) was studying in grade three in a village about 400 km away from the capital when her parents decided to send her to Kathmandu with perfect strangers.

The family, a young couple, promised Reema’s parents that the girl would live with them, go to a good school and be an “older sister” to their young son.

However, Reema’s life in Kathmandu turned out to be very different. The couple never enrolled her in school; she ate nothing but leftovers, took care of the couple’s son, did all the housework and was never paid.

She had very little contact with her folks back home, was regularly beaten, and often pulled by her hair.

One day, on her way to drop the little boy off at his school, she met some of the local CWISH workers who teach at a school nearby. When she went home and expressed interest in going to that school, she was beaten.

The next day she ran away, and found her way to the CWISH office where she asked for protection.

Of the 7.7 million children between the ages of five and 17 in Nepal, an estimated 3.14 million are working. Two-thirds of these children are below the age of 14.

A recent rapid assessment conducted by Plan International, one of the oldest children’s development organisations in the world, and World Education estimates that over 165,000 working children are domestic labourers.

“Their plight…does not get importance because it happens within the four walls of someone’s home and not out in the open,” Bishnu Timilsina, a team leader for CWISH in Nepal, told IPS.

Such offers are hard to resist: though Nepal has made progress in poverty reduction, the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2013 placed it at 157^th out of 187 countries listed.

According to the National Living Standard Survey 2010-2011 more than 30 percent of Nepalis live on less than 14 dollars per month.

About 80 percent of Nepalis, like Reema’s family, live in rural areas and depend on subsistence farming. Young children are expected to help their parents with farming and household chores.

Roughly half the children under five years of age in Nepal’s remote rural belt are malnourished, while their communities lack basic services like primary healthcare, education and safe drinking water.

The custom of plucking children from their villages gained traction with the rapid industrialisation of the 1990s, when the growth of the middle class coupled with internal migration during the People’s War years (1996-2006) fuelled demand for cheap labour.

Children quickly filled the gap left by women abandoning their traditional roles as homemakers in search of paid work, and took on all the domestic duties from cooking, scrubbing and washing clothes to caring for infants and the infirm.

Now, according to Plan International and World Education’s rapid assessment, there are as many child domestic workers in urban centres (62,579) as in rural areas (61,471).

Child rights activists say one of the biggest challenges is the widespread social perception that child labour is not necessarily a bad thing.

“There’s an understanding that children have to work so that they learn the ‘value’ of labour,” Nita Gurung, programme manager of the state-run Central Child Welfare Board (CCWB), told IPS.

As a result, enforcing laws that prohibit child domestic labour is not easy.

People see young children labouring in the homes of their “neighbours, relatives and friends” and accept this as a normal part of life, says Danee Luhar, a child protection officer with the Nepal country office of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

“There is a need to break through that perception so that society renders domestic child labour unacceptable,” he told IPS.

Nepal has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour and ILO Convention 138 on minimum age for admission to employment.

These international accords were translated into national laws via Nepal’s 2007 Interim Constitution and are enshrined in the 1992 Children’s Act, the 2000 Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, and the 2002 Bonded Labour Prohibition Act.

However, the creation of national and international legislation without an accompanying increase in the capacity to enforce them has led to confusion about which government agency is implementing which laws in cases of domestic child labour.

At present, 10 labour inspectors are charged with overseeing the entire country and its population of 30.49 million people.

These inspectors only cover formal sectors like mining, tourism and cigarette and carpet manufacturing; it is still unclear who is responsible for the rescue and rehabilitation of child labourers in informal settings, like private homes.

“It is extremely problematic because in cases of abuse and exploitation there’s first a confusion about who is in charge, and what law or act to interpret,” says UNICEF’s Luhar.

When Reema escaped her employers, for instance, she was taken to a safe house and a case was filed on her behalf at the government’s labour office.

Later, at the insistence of authorities, the perpetrators paid Reema cash compensation in the amount of 210 dollars, and signed a legal document agreeing to release her.

Reema is now safely back in her village but has yet to see the money, and her case at the labour office is pending.

“On paper there are regulations to make the perpetrators accountable but that is rarely done, and protection of victims is still not a priority,” child advocate Kamal Guragain told IPS.

Ugandan teenagers, 16-year-old Monica (l) and 14-year-old Raya (r) are grateful to no longer have to work to earn a living for their families so that they can now attend school. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA
, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

Children around the world may complain about attending school and doing their homework, but not 14-year-old Raya*. For two years she was forced by her illiterate parents to spend every day, rain or shine, selling sugar cane from the family garden to customers on the streets of Entebbe, about 35 km outside the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Sometimes she sold the crop alone, sometimes she sold it with her mother’s help. Children, travellers and the elderly were her main customers, but many people would take the sugar cane and run away without paying for it.

Raya’s daily earnings, normally 8,000 Ugandan shillings (three dollars), were used to put food on the table for her parents and four sisters.

“It happened when my mother had no money and she could no longer take me to school,” recalled the current grade nine pupil.“School is the best because you come to school to get skills on how to make money in future. I’m very happy.” -- 14-year-old former child labourer Raya

“It wasn’t easy … The day was harsh because the sunshine was too much and I would walk long distances looking for customers. If I rested, we wouldn’t have food that night. I didn’t like it because I wanted to go to school.”

There are 2.75 million children aged five to 17 years engaged in economic activities in Uganda, according to the 2009/2010 Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS) report.

The National Action Plan on Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour in Uganda 2012/13 to 2016/17, defines a child as a person below the age of 18.

The report, published by Uganda’s Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development in May 2012, defines child labour as “work that is mentally, physically, socially and/or morally dangerous and harmful to children; work that interferes with children’s school attendance; hazardous work which by the nature or circumstances under which it is performed jeopardises the health, safety and morals of children.”

Just over half – about 1.4 million – of Uganda’s child labourers toil away in hazardous jobs that include stone quarrying, brick-making and laying, sand and clay mining, charcoal burning, fishing, car washing and hunting.

Many others work in hotels and bars, where they often end up being beaten or sexually abused, said social worker Barbra Ongodia from local NGO Kids in Need (KIN). Some also work as house servants and in the construction and commercial agriculture industries.

Ongodia told IPS that there could actually be over 10 million child labourers in Uganda, a country with 34.5 million people. According to Ongodia, many of the child labourers come to Kampala from northern Uganda and work in the capital, after experiencing years of trauma from the war against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

The LRA fought in the north and northeastern parts of Uganda for 23 years, until they were kicked out of the country in 2006. The war, which forced close to two million people into camps for internally displaced persons for decades, was the most brutal that Uganda has faced since independence from Britain in 1962. It was also characterised by its use of child soldiers and brutality.

The rebel group is currently operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and western South Sudan.

According to UNHS statistics, western Uganda has the highest number of cases of children working, followed by the eastern and central regions, then the north.

The increasing prevalence of child labour is attributed to several factors, including high levels of poverty, the burden of HIV/AIDS, education costs, food insecurity and the soaring number of orphans under 18.

Ongodia said that child labour threatened all Ugandans. “The skills of the country are being undermined because these children are not learning, they are just becoming vagabonds,” she said.

Hamidu Kizito is a local journalist who has, for a decade, followed the “Stop Child Labour” campaign in Uganda by the Dutch development organisation Hivos. He told IPS that there is a “cultural trait” attached to children working.

“I remember … when we were growing up, we used to work, but we were not overworked,” he said.

“But over time there were families where children were overworked at the expense of their education and health … The struggle is how do we change the perception so everybody knows that this is not right,” he said.

Raya was eventually taken off the streets with the assistance of a KIN Child Labour Free Zone-committee, which consists of ordinary members of the community who help the NGO identify working children. KIN has found some children who have been working for up to five years, Ongodia said.

KIN works with the families of child labourers and parents are taught business skills. They can also borrow money from village savings and loan associations (VSLAs).

Today, Raya’s mother weaves baskets that she sells by the roadside, netting her about 300,000 Ugandan shillings (116 dollars) a month.

Despite being robbed of her education for two years, Raya does not blame her family for forcing her to work on the streets.

“I wasn’t mad at them because they had a lot of problems and they had to feed the whole family,” she said.

Raya has just completed her latest round of examinations. She enjoys Maths and English, and hopes to become an accountant.

Her best friend is Monica*, a 16-year-old former street food vendor, who was also helped by KIN. After Monica was taken off the streets, her mother joined a VSLA. Now, the schoolgirls spend all their lunchtimes together.

“Some children take it for granted to be in school, but they think others are like them. Some children are not in school but they would like to be,” Raya said.

“School is the best because you come to school to get skills on how to make money in future. I’m very happy.”

*Surname withheld to protect identity of minors.

Musah Razark Adams, 13, (r) shows the sling shot that he uses to hit birds with when he works in a local rice field. Adams and his brother, Seidu, 15, (l) work to so that they can pay for school materials and levies. Credit: Albert Oppong-Ansah/IPS

By Albert Oppong-Ansah
WUBA, Northern Ghana, May 30 2013 (IPS)

It is a school day but 13-year-old Musah Razark Adams, a Grade 5 primary school pupil in Wuba, northern Ghana, is standing in a rice field wielding a “koglung” – a sling shot to hit birds with.

He is not being a naughty boy. For a month of working from 7am to 6pm he is paid 10 dollars and given a 25-kg bag of rice or maize for every half hectare of land he protects by scaring the birds away.

Adams and other pupils like him have to engage in the arduous task popularly known in northern Ghana as “Away” – which means keeping birds from feeding on paddy farms. And this is usually done during school hours.

Schooling is nominally free in this West African nation, though each school charges its own additional costs. And children, ironically, are employed in “Away” in order to pay these additional school levies, such as Parent Teachers Association fees, and to buy school materials.“Although I feel ashamed forcing the children to engage in ‘Away’, I have no alternative means of getting money to care for them.” -- Iddrisu Adams

“When school started this year I asked my father to give me money to buy my educational materials and he told me to do what other people do to acquire the necessary items for school. He said he did not have money. So I have to do this (scare away birds) because all our farm produce has been sold to take care of feeding our family,” Adams tells IPS.

He dreams of being able to earn money for shoes and his basic educational needs – a school uniform, books and pencils. But right now, that seems like a far-fetched dream, since he does not have the 60 Ghana Cedi or 30 dollars to pay for them.

“Away” is a common cultural practice in Ghana’s Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions that keeps children out of school for at least a month from April to May, and then again from August to September.

Adams’ father, Iddrisu Adams, 45, has five other children and tells IPS that he is not financially stable enough to provide for them, which is why his sons engage in “Away”. Adams’ 15-year-old brother, Seidu, also works to scare birds.

“Although I feel ashamed forcing the children to engage in ‘Away’, I have no alternative means of getting money to care for them,” he says.

Robert Owusu, a rice farmer in Nyanpkala, Northern Region, tells IPS: “If people are not stationed to man the farm throughout the day the birds will eat the entire rice paddy.”

“Currently we don’t have any other method of scaring the birds although we know the children’s education is at stake,” he says, adding that adults are not employed to do this, as their labour is too expensive.

Though parents do not see it as being against the law, this practice is part of the many instances of child labour in northern Ghana.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) defines child labour as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development. This includes work that interferes with their schooling.

The Department of Social Welfare, Department of Children and ILO have initiated measures over the years to reduce child labour here, but they say these strategies are hampered by poverty in many communities.

Sanday Iddrisu, acting northern regional director for the Department of Children, tells IPS that the Children’s Act of Ghana states that no child should be deprived of access to education and prohibits parents and other individuals from subjecting a child to exploitative labour.

“Basically both international and national regulations are against such practices that expose children to this form of labour, which prevents them from having an education as any ordinary child,” he says.

He adds that many of the campaigns embarked on by his department and the Department of Social Welfare have proved futile. He says parents of children who work often use poverty as an excuse, stating that they cannot provide for their children’s needs without making them work.

While there is a National Plan of Action for the Elimination of Child Labour in Ghana, a survey by the Child Protection Unit at the Department of Labour says the nation has done little to eradicate the practice. About 1.27 million children between the ages of five and 17 in this country of 25 million people are engaged in activities classified as child labour, Emmanuel Otoo, an ILO representative in Ghana, tells IPS.

“Our focus and resources must now be on the operationalisation of the details of the many international and local conventions and laws Ghana has ratified, including the ILO Convention, the African Union Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, the Ghanaian Constitution and the Ghana Children’s Act of 1998,” he says.

Naa Alhassan Issahaku Amadu, the northern regional Ghanaian population officer, says the practice of child labour affects the intellectual, social and physical growth and development of children.

“Children need six universally-accepted teacher-student contact hours. And if they are kept out of class due to ‘Away’ they will miss out on all that has been taught,” he tells IPS.

Adams’ principal, Abdul-Salam Hamza Fataw, says children who engage in the practice are not able to follow lessons to their logical conclusion because of their absenteeism.

Fataw says that during “Away”, between April and May, a class of 50 children shrinks to about eight.

Umal Mohammed Farhim, the Kumbungu District Circuit supervisor of the Ghana Education Service (GES) in the Northern Region, tells IPS that children have the right to an education.

“Available statistics from Wuba Primary School for instance indicate that last year less than 40 percent of students passed their end of term exams,” he says.

A formal report will be sent to the GES head office in Tamale, the Northern Region’s capital, if a behavioural change approach for the next academic year fails to address the issue.

However, Afua Ayisibea Ohene-Ampofo, a project manager of the Northern Ghana office of the International Fertilizer Development Center, a public international organisation that addresses food security, tells IPS that the practice may not end due to its cultural dimension. She says the issue of child labour is closely linked to traditions that see no issue in encouraging children to work to meet their needs.

Ohene-Ampofo, who has worked as a development officer on various projects in the region for the past 10 years, says the poverty which was making parents force their children to continue the vicious cycle of “Away” could be reduced if parents were equipped with alternative livelihood skills such as bread baking, fashion designing, bee keeping or soap making.

Until then, Adams has to continue working.

“My dream of becoming a teacher may be dashed if I don’t support myself like this. I feel shy and bad engaging in such work, but I have to do it to secure my future … I don’t have a choice.”

Children in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, earn 44 cents a day cutting used condensed milk cans. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Gordon Brown
WASHINGTON, Apr 20 2013 (IPS)

“Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man you have seen, and ask yourself if this step you contemplate is going to be any use to him.”

Gandhi’s challenge from 1948 should be uppermost in our thoughts this week at the Washington summit led by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, when we examine why progress to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has stalled.

Gandhi’s challenge is this: who will speak up for the most marginalised – the out-of-school child, the child slave, the trafficked boy, the girl bride, the street child? Who will speak up for the most vulnerable and the hardest to reach? These are the forgotten millions that the MDGs were to do most to help. And yet the most revealing conclusion of our decade-long anti-poverty crusade is that despite great, and in some cases, outstanding progress, we have done least for those most in need.

This week in Washington, in the presence of Ban Ki-moon and Jim Yong Kim, we are discovering that unless we target resources on the most vulnerable, they will continue to miss out. While the MDG process has made huge strides for universal education, it has been best at plucking the “low hanging fruit” – with some of the most marginalised left high and dry. So there are still 15 million children working full-time when they should be at school, and ten million school-aged girls who get married every year, unlikely to return to education.

For these reasons, but also because of shortages of teachers and classrooms – and often sheer discrimination against girls – a total of 500 million girls growing up today will never complete their schooling.

Unfortunately our failure is no accident: universal goals, which do not explicitly target resources on the most vulnerable, mean that those who are already the most marginalised will continue to go without. Indeed, as we formulate a new set of post-2015 anti-poverty targets, we have to recognise that future MDGs will also fall short on delivery if they do not ensure more resources go to those in need.

Adam Wagstaff of the World Bank concludes from his studies on health as well as on education that: “It’s not actually true that progress at the population level will automatically entail faster progress among the poor. If inequalities in education and health outcomes across the income distribution matter, and if we want to see ‘prosperity’ in its broadest sense shared, it looks like we really do need an explicit goal that captures inequality.”

Our failure to reach those most in need is not just ethically indefensible for anyone who believes in equal opportunities. It is self-evidently bad for the MDGs: we can’t accelerate progress unless we get serious about reaching the poor.

So a new focus on the marginalised is central to new plans put by Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and others to the Washington summit this week. Nigeria is considering extending a World Bank pilot offering conditional cash transfers to girls in northern states who represent the largest group in the country’s ten million out-of-school population.

Ethiopia – which has seen one of the most rapid expansions of education enrolment anywhere in the world – is also now targeting the out-of-school girls in hard to reach rural areas who have so far not benefitted from the country’s progress. The DRC wishes to abolish school fees, which currently deter two million pupils from going to school.

Bangladesh wants to go further. It has also decided more resources are needed for the children of the flood zones and hill areas and the victims of child labour and child marriage – but it is also making an equity goal explicit in order to reach the most marginalised. It has committed to closing the gap in attendance rates between the richest and poorest income groups and to closing the learning gap between the best and poorest performing areas. Bangladesh faces a huge uphill fight to deliver on its new policy of increasing public spending on schools. It simply does not have the money for educational investment – either domestically or from the international community – to fund its new direction.

So while the public justification for all our efforts is to help the poorest, the frailest, the neediest and most vulnerable, we are coming to realise that our focus on universal goals must be matched by extra resources for the most marginalised. Indeed, when the next set of post-2015 MDGs includes more ambitious universal targets for learning outputs and secondary education, we must do more to prevent the most disadvantaged being left further behind. Put simply – as we start to raise the ceiling, we must not forget to finish putting in place the floor.

As Pauline Rose of the UNESCO Global Monitoring Report has concluded: “Unless we have a goal that tracks progress for the poorest and richest…on education access and learning, gaps are likely to remain when we reach the next deadline for goals.”

So one of the lessons to learn from more than ten years of experience in trying to meet the MDGs is that, without corrective remedies, unequal outcomes in one generation conspire with unequal access to resources in the next to make a mockery of genuine equality of opportunity. Here we rely on and are influenced by the original thinking of Indian economist Amartya Sen, who argues that “equivalent freedom” for people who come to the table with unequal advantages requires more resources to turn the right to equal treatment into real opportunity.

Fortunately there is already a growing consensus that without this focus on inequality we cannot meet our ambitions on behalf of the poor. In education we need what Kevin Watkins of the Overseas Development Institute calls “stepping stone” targets for reducing inequalities, with timelines for 2020 and 2025 on the way to our universal goals in 2030. Further commitments are required to reduce the gap in school attendance and completion rates between poorest and wealthiest and between best and worst performing areas.

What makes me convinced that we could gain support for these measures? It is that these forgotten millions that the MDGs were to do most to help are prepared to be silent no more.

Poor rural girls now know that they do not have the freedom to choose to go to school – and that the 2015 goal of schooling for all will not be worth the paper it is written on without a commitment to greater equity. Child labourers know that they have been left behind – and that their human right to education is not being delivered by their governments or the international agencies responsible.

I am struck by the energy, creativity and determination I see in these new civil rights movements, led by Malala Yousafzai. Children are providing leadership lessons from which we can learn.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Though illegal, Nepali girls are often married off in their teens. Credit: Naresh Newar/IPS

By Naresh Newar
KATHMANDU, Oct 11 2012 (IPS)

Social activists in Nepal agree that the one reason why this impoverished country will miss the gender-linked Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of the United Nations is the persistence of child marriage.

Nepal’s marriage law stipulates 20 years as the legal age for marriage for both sexes, but current records at the ministry of health and population show at least 23 percent of  girls getting married off at 15 – 19 years.

“Early marriage should be stopped because it not only affects girls’ education but also their health,” Sumon Tuladhar, education specialist at the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), tells IPS.

While MDG 2 pushes for universal primary education, MDG3 seeks to promote gender equality and empower women. Child marriage works against MDG 4, that is concerned with reducing child mortality, as also MDG 5 that aims to improve maternal health.

“We certainly need to strongly lobby against early marriage, but we are hampered by a very poor monitoring system to implement the existing law,” Dibya Dawadi, deputy director-general in the department of education, told IPS.

But, for both the government as well as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with child marriage, enforcing the law is a dilemma because legal action means prosecuting the parents.

“Sticking a mother in jail is not helpful when she may have other young children with no one to feed and protect them,” Helen Sherpa from World Education, an international NGO, tells IPS.

Activists, however, believe that change should tackle the root of the problem – their economic situation, because daughters provide valuable help in the household and on the farms in the rural areas.

“Our biggest challenge is the family’s attitude towards educating their girls,” says Dawadi.

Many rural families marry off their daughters at the age of 11 – 13 because the older a girl gets the higher the dowry demand.

Kamala Chepang was married off at 13 because her parents could not afford to educate all their children.

“I see my young siblings going to school and this makes me happy,” Kamala told IPS in the remote Shaktikhor village of Chitwan district, 300 km southwest of the capital.

Thousands of young girls like Kamala, especially from the most marginalised communities like the Chepangs, are unable to continue their education due to poverty, social barriers and a lack of schools in the remote rural areas.

Although the trend of sending young daughters to their husbands’ home has changed and most of them stay with their mothers till they reach 16, their lives change drastically after marriage and they rarely return to school.

“After marriage, these girls rarely come back to school and even if they do, their performance is very poor,” says Tuladhar from UNICEF. “Early marriage negatively impacts their self confidence.”

According to UNICEF, 51 percent of Nepalese were married as children. Nepal’s 2006 demographic and health survey found that among Nepalese women in the 20 – 49 age group, 60 percent were married by the time they reached 18.

Nepal scores poorly on gender disparity. In 2011  Nepal stood 126^th out of 135 countries in the ‘Global Gender Gap’ index of the  World Economic Forum.

“Early marriage changes a girl’s life options because parents no longer want to invest in ‘someone else’s property’,” says Kaman Singh Chepang, an activist from Nepal Chepang Association, an NGO working for the Chepang community.

Dire poverty and lack of government initiatives to get girls to school are among reasons that Chepang cites for the situation of girls in Nepal, a country where more than half of a total population of  30 million people live on less than 1.25 dollars a day.

Chepang believes that if child marriage is to be eradicated there should be close coordination among government sectors dealing with health, education, poverty and culture and also give priority to basic schooling. “But the government is unready for any such initiative.”

In the remote villages, girls may have to walk hours to reach their classrooms, and by the time they return home they are too exhausted to do their homework. In the end, they just drop out and help their parents until they are married off.

Child marriage not only denies girls an education, it often makes them vulnerable to a cycle of discrimination, domestic violence and abuse. By being made to bear children when they have barely attained puberty, they are forced to put themselves and their babies at risk, activists say.

“Child marriage is extreme denial of children’s rights. Many girls also suffer from abusive marriages as they are married to older boys,” said Sherpa from World Education.