One in 12 of the world's children is involved in the worst forms of child labour, including slavery, forced labor, hazardous work, militant action and the commercial sex industry, according to a report published Monday by the U.N. child welfare agency, UNICEF.

UNICEF UK said that globally, 352 million children aged 5 to 17 are engaged in some type of work, including 211 million who work in family homes or farms.

Ninety-seven percent of all working children live in developing countries; in Africa alone, nearly half the children between 5 and 14 are working, the agency said.

The report said children are driven into work and exploitation by poverty and inadequate education, exacerbated by the effects of HIV and AIDS.

"One way to put an end to the exploitation of children ... is by taking action to make poverty history and ensuring a commitment to more and better international aid," said David Bull, executive director of UNICEF UK, in a statement.

He noted that more than 30 years ago, the world's richest countries agreed to provide 0.7 percent of their gross national income for development assistance.

"Yet today only five countries - Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden - are fulfilling their promise," he said. "One billion children around the world are still living in poverty and this is an unacceptable injustice."

Bull said Britain had shown "significant leadership" by committing to meet the 0.7 percent target by 2013, "but we are now calling for a firm pledge to reach this target before 2013 because it will really make a difference to children's lives.

"By 2013, still only half of Africas children will complete primary school and one in six will die before their fifth birthday."

UNICEF UK says that in the 43 countries with an average annual income of US$500 or less per person, the percentage of children in child labour is usually 30-60 percent, while in countries where income is between US$500 to US$1000, the percentage of child labourers drops to between 10 and 30 percent.

Globally, an estimated 114 million children of primary school age are not enrolled in school, depriving one in five children of an education.

UNICEF says children are exploited wherever there are gaps in the structures created to protect them.

Even in developing countries, they are often exposed to unacceptable risks; in Britain, for example there are large holes in the protection provided for children trafficked into the country from abroad to work.

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?tl=1&display=rednews/
2005/02/21/build/world/33-childlabor.inc

As the World Trade Organisation launches a review of trade policy in Paraguay, the ICFTU today publishes a report underlining a series of shortcomings in the application and enforcement of core labour standards in the Latin American country. The report, submitted to the WTO for consideration alongside their trade review, highlights absence of respect for trade union rights, discrimination and child labour as particularly problematic in the country.

A significant number of restrictions on trade union rights still exist today in Paraguay. In particular, the minimum requirement of 300 workers to form a trade union, coupled with excessive demands on potential trade union officers and difficult registration procedures heavily impinge on trade union activity in Paraguay. In addition, authorities fail to apply effective sanctions to prevent trade union discrimination, and harassment and unfair dismissals continue.

Discrimination in employment and wages is another failing of the country’s system. The few available statistical indicators show a large wage gap between men and woman, and that less than 10% of women are employed in public sector posts, professional and technical positions. Segregation in the workplace continues and unemployment among women is higher than among men.

Child labour is prevalent in Paraguay, and some 14% of all children between the ages of 5 and 17 years are employed, mainly working in the agricultural sector on family farms, as vendors or as domestic workers. Child prostitution is also a serious problem. More than a third (34.9%) of all working children between 5 and 17 years do not attend school.

Full report

http://www.icftu.org/displaydocument.asp?Index=991221569&Language=EN

Children's advocates are seeking to turn up the pressure on the World Bank to include children's rights in its poverty reduction strategies, used by some 70 low-income countries.

Under the World Bank's current model for poverty reduction, any country seeking assistance from the bank or its sister agency, the International Monetary Fund, must draft a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). The papers should prioritise ''macroeconomic, structural, and social'' strategies to reduce poverty using input from civil society, according to the lending agency's Web site.

But for years, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and U.N. agencies have complained of being unable to get the bank to fund a number of socially related projects that protect the rights of children.

That difficulty has been among the signs that ''the world power structure is not organized in favor of kids,'' said Annie Leatt, a programme manager at the Children's Institute in South Africa who took part in a conference here this week on children and poverty.

Children's rights are broadly defined in Article 27 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as ''the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral, and social development.'' The United States and Somalia are the only countries in the world not to have ratified the treaty.

One billion of the world's 2.2 billion children currently live in poverty and 3,900 die every day because they lack access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, according to UNICEF, the U.N. children's agency.

Participants in the conference, which ended late Wednesday, urged the World Bank to focus its programmes on services required to keep people out of poverty in the long run, and not simply on boosting poor families' incomes.

Education, for example, can break the cycle of poverty that passes between generations, said Rosalia Cortes, principal researcher at the Latin American social scientists' association FLACSO. However, she added, the bank's strategies do not help poor families develop the environment necessary for their children to attend school regularly

''In Latin America, poverty and welfare programmes don't address these issues. They just transfer money to the head of the household'' with no way to ensure how the money is spent, Cortes said.

While this system ''has contained social unrest,'' new studies show it has not raised school attendance nor increased job opportunities over the long term, she added.

The result ''is a continuation of a long-term pattern of low education, low skill, and low opportunity for employment,'' circumstances which then transfer to the children, Cortes said.

Howard White, senior evaluation officer in the bank's internal evaluation department, acknowledged that PRSPs are not based on a child rights model and said reference to children's rights likely could not be found in the strategy papers.

''On the other hand, I would say that approach is implicit,'' White told IPS. While some people use the concept of children's rights to include things like abolishing child labour, White said, the bank's broad focus ''is on the things that matter most.''

''For example, Bangladesh has reducing under-five mortality as one of the goals of the PRSP, and reducing child malnutrition,'' he said, adding that ''the biggest deprivation is having your children die.''

White further said that there might be some countries with specific groups of children that fall out of the Bank's reach. He largely attributed this to flawed data.

The bank bases its poverty strategy in large part on income-related poverty data gathered by household. This results in ''incomplete poverty analysis,'' White said, because it does not include poor children not living in households. For example, ''a bank survey in Mauritania did not cover nomads or street children,'' he said.

This is the ''nature of the way data is collected'' White said, and is not a matter of oversight. Children missed by the data, he added, while varying between countries, only amount to a maximum of 5 percent of the population..

White suggested that if people wish to raise other children's issues, these should be dealt with outside the PRSP framework. If this is not possible, then ''perhaps the PRSP should take notice of other issues,'' he added.

Children's rights advocates, however, said the PRSP model had become their focus largely because it casts a shadow over virtually every aspect of development policymaking at country level.

Their governments would not look at programmes that did not fit the PRSP model, they said, so how could NGOs and U.N. agencies work on children's rights outside that framework?

''PRSPs may not be perfect but within this imperfection lies the space to do something,'' said Jeffrey Maganya, an advisor on poverty, social, and economic rights to The Cradle, a Kenya-based children's foundation.

''When money gets allocated to a ministry you have a space. All policies get interpreted then implemented,'' Maganya said. But first, ''they have to decide on the definition of 'poor' or of 'marginalisation'. At that stage, let's be there to tell them what is 'poor'. Then you don't have to wait for the World Bank to review the poverty reduction report two or three years down the line.''

There also is some hope of closer cooperation between the bank and U.N. agencies. Uganda's PRSP, for example, is linked not only to national poverty reduction goals but also to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, which broadly address child poverty, said Monique Segarra, an international development specialist and professor at U.S.-based Vassar College. (END/2005)

http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=28491

The number of children at work in Morocco is falling but the kingdom must do more to address the problem affecting 600,000 children, an official report said on Tuesday.

"Child labour is declining in Morocco," said a joint report by the government, UNICEF and the International Labour Organisation released at a seminar on child labour.

The number of children at work fell 4 percent from 1991 to 2001, the report said, because of efforts by the government to increase schooling opportunities for them.

The vast majority of the children work in the agricultural sector, but also in the textile industry making carpets.

Morocco is ranked 125th in the latest U.N. human development index based on education and public health and life expectancy.

The North African country's social indicators, such as illiteracy, are far worse in rural areas where a little less than half of the country's 30 million people live.

Fighting child labour will require efforts from local aid groups and parents, and not only the government, said Labour and Professional Training Minister Mustapha Mansouri.

"This is a major challenge for the Moroccan government. We have to get drinking water, electricity, schools and hospitals in our rural areas," Mansouri told Reuters on the sidelines of the seminar in the capital Rabat.
In 1999, the government launched a strategy to reduce child labour by raising the minimum schooling age, he said.

According to the report, 84 percent of working children are based in rural areas. More than half have never been to school and neither have their parents.

Some of the children work up to 61 hours a week in dangerous conditions, with a survey of 3,500 working children showing only 3 percent of them work in a safe environment, the report said.

Girls represent the majority of children at work, especially as housemaids in cities.

A study earlier this year revealed that 36 percent of women who were raped in Morocco last year worked as maids.

http://www.reuters.co.za/locales/c_newsArticle.jsp;
:426e6e7e:35d7a6753d2a66d?type=topNews&localeKey=en_ZA&storyID=8300448

Human rights activists called on Southeast Asian governments on Tuesday to crack down on sex tourism and child trafficking, saying the problem was becoming more rampant.

Experts and rights workers said more women and children in Southeast Asia were being trafficked to feed the appetite of sex tourists.

"There must be a co-ordinated and co-operative effort if we are to succeed in eradicating human trafficking, especially child sex trafficking from this region," said Vitit Muntarbhorn, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on child prostitution.

"It is most timely for ASEAN countries to tackle the issue in view of its recent declaration against trafficking," Muntarbhorn told Reuters.

ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

ECPAT, an international non-governmental organisation working to stop the commercial sexual exploitation of children, said there were more than 1 million child prostitutes involved in sex tourism in Asia, of which 300,000 were in Thailand, 100,000 in the Philippines and Taiwan and 40,000 in Vietnam.

"Many of them are tricked into the trade, it is easy to do so because the women and children are young, illiterate, vulnerable and gullible," Linda Smith, founder of Shared Hope International, a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation fighting against human trafficking, told Reuters.

The U.S. State Department estimates about 600,000 to 800,000 people -- mostly children and women -- are trafficked across national borders annually.

Girls from the villages of Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines are lured into cities or neighbouring countries with promises of lucrative jobs as waitresses and domestic helpers, only to end up in massage parlours and karaoke bars.

Others are flown as far as Australia, Japan, South Africa and the United States to be kept as slaves in brothels -- beaten, drugged, starved or raped in the first days of their reclusion to intimidate and prepare them for clients, the experts say.

Sex tourism is a profitable business. Data provided by the International Labour Organisation showed that 2 to 14 percent of the gross domestic product of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand comes from sex tourism, experts said.

"We can't just look at the supply factor. The picture would be incomplete without recognising that the sex market involves both local and foreign demand," Muntarbhorn said.

"We have to address sex tourism squarely to stamp out sex trafficking."

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=
5722826&cKey=1114521622000

Delegates meeting in Madagascar this week are expected to tackle the often-neglected issue of child rights in western Indian Ocean island countries.

The three-day conference, which started on Monday, brings together child rights advocates from Mauritius, Comoros, Seychelles and Reunion to discuss ways of dealing with the causes and impact of violence on children.

Recommendations from this sub-regional meeting are expected to contribute to a global study on violence against children, mandated by the United Nations Secretary General in 2001 for completion in 2006.

Participants at the gathering, organised by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), will also review legal and institutional responses to the battle against child abuse.

"We are here to make a difference in the lives of children. We are confident that our discussions during the next three days will cover ground in an area that merits our attention," UNICEF's officer-in-charge, Bashige Bashizi, said in statement on Tuesday.

UNICEF highlighted that, although sparsely documented, family violence existed throughout the western Indian Ocean countries: a 1998 study in Madagascar's capital, Antananarivo, found that one in five children had suffered domestic violence.

The meeting is one of the first of a series of joint initiatives launched by UNICEF, the University of Mauritius and the Indian Ocean Observatory for Child Rights, which was set up last year to monitor the situation of children in the region.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/296f64d51030a1c55989141ea7f0f80f.htm

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working for children in Pakistan have stressed the need for a child to be defined as anyone under the age of 18.

Through a study on violence against children submitted to the United Nations, the NGOs have also asked the UN Commission for Human Rights to appoint a special rapporteur on violence against children, monitor the implementation of child protection laws, investigate abuses, and submit recommendations for child protection.

The UN General Assembly had mandated a study in 2003 to raise awareness about violence against children, help understand the causes of violence through data collection and analysis, and to make plans at local, national, regional and international level to curb the menace. In response to the UN mandate, the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) and Plan Pakistan conducted the study.

Every individual under the age of 18 is a child, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Pakistan has not been able to evolve a uniform age definition for a child. It is 18 years according to the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance (JJSO) 2000, 15 years according to the Sindh Children Act and the Hudood Ordinance defines it according to puberty. Pakistan normally follows the CRC on the age issue.

The report submitted to the UN commission also demands an end to the violence against children, including corporal punishment in schools, new legislation in consultation with all stakeholders, the state as a protector of child rights, and basic education and shelter for helpless children.

The report stresses reporting on child issues by various stakeholders, investigation into child abuse cases, action against those guilty of abuse and elimination of causes of violence against children including poverty and illiteracy.

The report urges the UN to improve coordination and collaboration among all stakeholders, including UN agencies and governments. UNICEF should lead the campaign for child rights, it says. It asks civil society organisations to gain access to street children, work for the implementation of laws for children, and take note of child right violations at all levels.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_26-4-2005_pg7_14

Ten days ago, an innocuous eight-line press statement found its way into New Zealand newsrooms.

Finance Minister Michael Cullen announced a doubling of the child tax rebate, to be included in the next tax bill. The move would cost $7.2 million a year and could benefit up to 30,000 children, Dr Cullen said.

It sounded like working would become a better deal for children. And on paper, everything looks fine. Working children are entitled to written contracts, paid annual leave and sick leave. They can benefit from mediation in the case of conflicts with employers, receive parental leave payments, and those under the age of 16 cannot work between 10pm and 6am.

But the move has social services sector worried. A Caritas survey found Kiwi children aged 11 and 12 clean other people's houses to help pay for their family's expenses. They work till 1am and are rewarded with alcohol. They get cuts, burns, dog bites and broken bones from their jobs, work without contracts and have never heard of unions.

That is child work in New Zealand.

But the Government is keeping its eye on their tax bill. By mid-year, the amount of income, excluding interest and dividends, that a child can earn tax-free will increase from $1040 to $2340 a year.

The Government will adjust a rebate that was last reviewed in 1983, improve Labour's image among voters, and, according to Victoria University senior lecturer in public policy Robert Stephens, reduce the Inland Revenue Department's workload significantly. "Every dollar of earnings is effectively taxed at source. It is a lot of work for IRD to get the money, and they get very little from it. And many (young taxpayers) could claim some of the tax back – getting the low-income tax rebate (which would lower) the tax rate to 15 per cent.

"So why not get rid of all this administration and compliance cost hassle and increase the rebate?"

Yet this win-win situation may ultimately turn sour for those who are the most vulnerable.

Caritas, a Catholic social justice agency, is concerned the move, while long overdue from a tax perspective, may increase children's participation in a workforce that does not adequately protect them from harm.

A survey of 5000 working children in 2003 showed some used heavy machinery, carried excessive loads and were injured on the job. This was not being picked up by the Labour Department.

"The main issue for us is that there seems to be little active enforcement of guidelines," Caritas spokeswoman Lisa Beech said.

Another concern was that children from poor homes would be encouraged to work at the expense of their studies and time off.

The Caritas survey showed almost 40 per cent of children from poorer homes worked to supplement family income.

And a higher percentage of 10 to 12-year-olds than older age groups tended to pass on their earnings to their family.

The study also showed the lack of proper employment agreements and union coverage meant some employers were exploiting children, paying them less than $2 an hour. One in four children reported pay rates of less than $5 an hour. Current guidelines for children's employment were not being enforced in many areas, including restriction on children's use of machinery and working after 10pm.

Another concern was the number of children reporting accidents and those under 14 working unsupervised.

"We are reluctant to see anything that will increase children's participation in the workforce without improvements in the protection of children at work," Ms Beech said.

Mr Stephens said the rebate might achieve the wrong results. Well-off parents might attempt to divest assets to their children in order to receive the tax exemption, and it was likely some children would work and supplement the family income rather than study.

"Whether the tax exemption will make a big difference is unknown. I suspect not, partly due to ignorance of the exemption change," he said.

Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa says discussing tax breaks misses the point – it is far more urgent to enforce or strengthen existing legislation protecting children.

Chairwoman Alison Blaiklock said the present legislation was inadequate and lacked controls. Increasing the tax exemption, and thus the incentive to work, meant young children could be working very long hours.

"We have no minimum age of employment, no minimum wage for children under 16, and no maximum hours of work. That's against International Labour Organisation recommendations and surprising when you look at the trend for adults. There needs to be a system to protect children from being exploited."

Children's welfare was not high enough on the political agenda, though there were clear economic arguments for investing in them, she said.

Comparing New Zealand with other industrialised countries showed a higher mortality rate from injuries, suicide and transmittable diseases, a wider poverty gap, a higher number of teenage mothers and lower rates of teens in education.

Ms Beech said that arguing, as the Government did, that further restrictions on child labour were not necessary was misguided. "The work situation of children in New Zealand is of concern to the Human Rights Commission."

Not that the Labour Department shows a lack of interest in consulting child organisations – rather, it seems to be following its own agenda on child employment, with welfare associations largely unaware of policies and plans.

A long-awaited consultation meeting with Caritas last month was cancelled – and so far, no replacement date has been set.

<http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3260237a1864,00.html>

As the United Nations urged Nepal's government and Maoist rebels to leave school children out of the insurgency that has claimed over 11,000 lives since 1996, UNICEF said Monday the Himalayan kingdom would have difficulty meeting a global goal of getting an equal number of girls and boys in schools.

''The gender gap in South Asia is still unacceptably wide, with 80 per cent of boys in school compared with only 75 per cent of girls,'' said UNICEF's latest 'Progress for Children' report, focusing on gender parity in primary school attendance.

''The countries with the widest gender gaps in the region are Pakistan, where UNICEF projections for 2005 show a gender parity index (GPI) of just 0.83, and Nepal, 0.89,'' said the report.

Gender parity index is the ratio of girls' to boys' net primary attendance - the number of girls for every 100 boys attending primary school. A GPI of 1.0 represents 100 girls for every 100 boys in school.