50,000 children live on streets, 22 million out of school
 
ISLAMABAD: Child rights groups have estimated that over 50,000 children live on the streets of Pakistan, while most of the juvenile population continues to be vulnerable to bonded labour, harassment, sexual abuse and trafficking, and lacks access to health, education and other basic needs.

Many street children are also addicted to drugs and have been sexually assaulted. It has been reported that 56 percent of street children run away from their homes due to domestic violence, 22 percent because of hostile behaviour of their parents and 12 percent due to their parents’ drug addiction.

The Society for Protection of Rights of Children (SPARC) has also reported that children leave their homes because of poverty, corporal punishment at home and school and sexual abuse. These children are also prone to road injuries since many of them end up begging or picking pockets.

Non-governmental organisation Save the Children reported that 22 million or over 50 percent of the 40 million children in the age group of 5 to 14 years in Pakistan were not in school. Some had never attended school while others dropped out before completing their primary level. The annual report of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on the state of world children rated Pakistan at 47th place among 157 countries in terms of basic indicators for child welfare for the year 2007.

UNICEF has also stated that 500,000 children died in Pakistan in 2006 before reaching the age of five years. Another report by Save the Children reported that out of every 100 children born, nine would die before their first birthday. It also reported that one-thirds of the children in Pakistan lived in abject poverty.

The government, in its last ‘Economic Survey of Pakistan’, acknowledged that the country lagged well behind other countries in the region with respect to indicators on the situation of children.

According to data compiled by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), at least 500 cases of violence against children were reported in 2006, including kidnapping for ransom. In its 2006 report, Sahil, an NGO working for the rights of children, stated that in the first six months of the year, some 1,164 children had been sexually abused. From among these victims, 213 girls had been subjected to gang rape. Of the 1,164 reported cases, some 849 victims were girls and 315 boys. Over 50 percent of the accusers were acquaintances of the victims.

Although Pakistan ratified ILO Convention 182 on the ‘Worst Forms of Child Labour’ in 2001, children continue to be employed in all sectors. In most cases they are forced to work due to the financial needs of their families.

The Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) has indicated that 25 percent of the total labour force of Pakistan, which number over 50 million, is aged between 10 and 19 years.

The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) says that there are a total of 70 million children in the country and 25 million of them are engaged in labour.

Children affected by poverty were the most vulnerable to being trafficked within or outside the country. The rights organisations have urged the government to prioritise the rights of children and comply with international conventions. The HRCP has also called for policy guidelines on responses to complaints about the abuse of children

Tony Blair has hit back against accusations that Britain has become a less fair society during his tenure as Prime Minister.

Mr Blair "strongly disputed" the claim and warned that the situation was more complicated than "shock reports" often conveyed.

He denied that inequality had risen on his watch and stressed that levels of absolute poverty among children had halved.

However, he conceded that a specific minority of children were being left behind by the Government's "ordinary general policy".

Mr Blair's comments come after a poll for the Sunday Telegraph found that 90% of voters believe he has failed to make Britain less selfish in almost a decade in power. The huge majority includes 43% who think things are worse and 47% no better than under the last Tory administration.

The Prime Minister boasted in his speech to the 2004 Labour Party conference that his Government had created "a fairer Britain, yes. Better than Tory Britain, I should hope so."

Interviewed on BBC One's Sunday AM, Mr Blair insisted: "If you look at what has happened to Britain over the past 10 years, I would strongly dispute the fact that we are a less fair society.

"Child poverty had been rising exponentially in the years we came to power. We have now put it in the opposite direction. And if you look at absolute poverty among children, it's halved."

He added: "I don't say we don't have to carry on doing all of this but you have got to be careful when you read these so-called shock reports - there was an article in the papers today about 12-year-olds becoming alcoholics.

"There are real problems, I think, to do with the specific minority of children that are getting left behind by the ordinary general policy. That I think is a very specific problem."

Children are the most vulnerable and, in many respects, the most vital aspect of any community's future. However they remain one of the most neglected social groups says Professor Ross Homel, Director of the Ethics and Governance Centre at Queensland's Griffith University.

Professor Homel, a specialist in developmental approaches to crime prevention, said the Australian government had ratified the international charter on the rights of the child. He said that the States had done a lot to address child abuse, but these had only occurred through public pressure.

"We really haven't looked at the impact of social and economic change [in Australia], particularly on disadvantaged children," Professor Homel said, "and we have absolutely failed, dismally and comprehensively, as a nation to respond in a satisfactory manner to the needs of children in indigenous communities."

Australia's preoccupation with "material success" had seen the erosion of community values in the last decade, Professor Homel said, and with climate change capturing so much attention he feared children's rights would continue to be ignored.

The Professor Homel says it is important to understand that children did not grow up in isolation but in circles of family, school and community at large. Input and support at all these levels were crucial in determining behaviour later in life.

"Its about working in communities with families and schools to change the developmental pathways of children," he said, "so that, instead of ending up in prison, as many of them are destined to do, they end up as productive citizens and also have happy and mentally healthy lives."

Professor Homel launched a report in Canberra late last year which documented a programme of family and community support in underprivileged and vulnerable families of Brisbane.

Titled Pathways to Prevention , the report showed substantial improvements in communication, behaviour and social skills for children in those families.

A forum held jointly by Just Rights Queensland (JRQ) and Concerned Psychologists for Children's Rights in Brisbane this week will highlight the continuing use of violence as a method of discipline in families.
Jeff Brunne, spokeperson for JRQ, said under Queensland law, parents were still able to use, "what is described as reasonable physical methods to restrain children or respond to children's behaviour". This did not conform to international standards which respected the rights of children, he stated, and further emphasised the need to recognise that "children are human beings equal to any other human beings".
"Children like adults should not be subject to assault," Mr Brunne said.

Child's environment
According to Sydney psychologist, Robin Grille, war, injustice and even environmental destructiveness can be related back to emotional injuries sustained in childhood.

In his book titled Parenting for a Peaceful World , Mr Grille documents the traumatic and often brutally violent childhoods of some of the world's worst dictators, including Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

The most compelling support for his claims however is the inclusion of a study conducted in 1988 of 400 German "rescuers" and "non rescuers" of Jews during the Nazi era.

Both groups were uncannily similar across a range of measures, including economic status, religious belief, levels of risk and friendship with Jews. The distinguishing feature that set them apart was "how they had been parented"

"Rescuers," tended to describe their parents as warmer and more caring that "non rescuers", Mr Grille said, and, while both groups described their childhoods as disciplined, rescuers said their parents had used non-violent methods of discipline.

Internationally
Recent figures from the International Labour Organisation (ILO) show that globally one in six children aged 5 - 17 are involved in child labour world wide, with the Asia Pacific region having the highest number at 122 million and Sub Saharan Africa having the highest proportion, at 26 per cent of children (49 million), involved in work.

According to Amnesty International there are over 300,000 children involved in armed conflict in at leat 30 hot spots around the world. While many are combatants and actively fight in the conflict, others are used as spies, messengers, to carry supplies, servants, or to clear landmines. Many experience sexual and other forms of violence.

On February 12, 2002, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child came into force. This Protocol raises the minimum age for direct participation in conflict to 18 years, from the previous minimum age of 15 years.

As of May 2, last year,107 states were parties to the Protocol including three (France, UK and USA) of the five permanent members of the Security Council, but not the Russian Federation and China.

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/7-2-20/51946.html

Advocates want consumers to know if child labour was used in making of candy

Abidjan, COTE D'IVOIRE–As sweethearts spend billions on boxes of artfully wrapped Valentine's Day chocolates, a U.S.-led plan to save children from the worst forms of child labour on West African cocoa plantations is a tangled mess – a lot like love itself.

Five years after Iowa's Democratic Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation to stamp every chocolate bar sold in the U.S. with a "free from child labour" label, industry, government and farmers are stuck in a quagmire of sorting out certification to ensure that only adult hands plant, harvest and transport the beans made into products like M&Ms and Mars bars.

"It helps to be aware of the problem. But to solve the problem ... I don't feel we are on the way so far," admits Amouan Acquah, the government's special advisor for agricultural commodities.

Save the Children Canada is calling for a similar tracking system, which would allow Canadian candy buyers to trace where the beans in their chocolate bars originate and whether child labour was used in processing.

Still, farmers say having children work on the farm is part of the natural teaching process that will ready their sons for the day they grow their own cocoa.

Four sets of eyes follow farmer Cheba Ouattara as he pries milky white beans from the slimy confines of a yellow cacao pod in preparation for planting. Three of Ouattara's disciples are his sons, aged 13, 15 and 18. The other is a 4-year-old neighbour who followed them to the isolated, 16-hectare farm in the heart of Côte d'Ivoire's cacao region.

"You can't leave your child at the village," said farmer Eugene Djiara. "They must go to the farm. If you leave them behind in the village, they pick up bad habits."

Since a 2001 report from the International Labour Organization found thousands of children working in the depths of Côte d'Ivoire's isolated cacao farms, the Ivorian government has spent a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to assess the extent of the situation in six central villages.

It is seemingly impossible to get a sense of the number of children actually working in the fields, which span some of Côte d'Ivoire's more remote regions, hiding small workers in the leafy expanse of the tall cacao bushes.

One anti-child labour group quotes a U.S. State Department report saying there are 15,000 children involved. Harkin's literature claims there are 5,000 children exposed to the worst forms of child labour, which include working with sharp instruments, heavy loads, chemicals and fires.

The Ivorian government project, meant to train people to teach about the dangers of child labour and set up task forces to monitor the situation, found more than 6,500 children in six villages were "at risk" of the worst forms of child labour.

"We needed to know the reality on the ground. It's not as exaggerated like they say, but it exists," Acquah said.

The ILO report found some of the children working in Côte d'Ivoire were actually from neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso, desert countries where people are so desperate, parents were selling their children to farmers who sometimes paid their workers nothing, often leaving them malnourished and sometimes beating them.

After intense industry lobbying, Harkin's motion went from a stamp on every chocolate bar to a stamp on every bag of cocoa beans to certification for every farm, moving from a ban on any child involvement to only the most serious forms of child labour.

With less than six months to go before the July deadline to implement certification, none of the world's cocoa producing countries has managed to solve the riddle of documentation and Côte d'Ivoire, the world's biggest cocoa producer, is facing the added challenge of a stalemated civil war.

"We can't monitor every cocoa farm," Acquah said. "Farmers just work with children because they won't have to pay."

Harvesting the beans for chocolate is brutal work. Ripe pods are collected by hand, using machetes, then split open to collect the seeds, which are dried, fermented, packaged and shipped.

With the war hurting cacao prices and making the usual migration of adult workers more difficult, more and more farmers are having trouble finding and paying seasonal workers, making children even more vulnerable, said Michel Seka, a project manager with the German Development Agency.

The agency spends about $100,000 each year supporting small programs in 57 cocoa-producing villages and Seka's desk is littered with funding requests for programs aimed at getting kids off farms and into school.

Huge sandstone quarries are fuelling landscaping boom on the cheap

Working to survive ... Child labour laws are routinely ignored in the rush for profits. Photo: Desmond Boylan/Reuters
 
In the blazing morning sun Naresh swings a hammer on to a square grey sandstone slab, his features focused on chipping away the rock until it is the length of his feet. Around the boy are crates of blocks, which are graded by texture and shape before being tied up into neat bundles.
What is harvested in this Indian quarry, in the heart of the largest sandstone reserve in the world, ends up laid on gardens in Britain.

"gitti", about a square metre of paving stones that will cost £35 when sold for patios and driveways in Britain. He says that as long as he is paid, what the stones are used for and where they end up are not his concern. He works to survive. "My father is sick, my mother is dead. I make 2,000 rupees a month. I have to work. I do not want to go to school," he said in between thwacks of his hammer.

The child is part of a migrant workforce, drawn in by a sandstone rush in which more than 400,000 tonnes of rock will be mined in the next 12 months from the arid flatlands of the western Indian state of Rajasthan.
The supply may be in the subcontinent, but the demand is generated 5,000 miles away in the builders' yards and garden centres of Britain, where the rise of "landscape makeovers" has all but exhausted the paving stones traditionally mined from the Pennines.

Five years ago builders' merchants in Britain scoured the planet for rock whose colours matched the elusive York stone craved by garden-lovers in Britain. The closest match was the grey and beige sandstones from Rajasthan.

The result is a quarrying boom. Sandstone is desert India's version of oil, a mineral wealth just below the sands of Rajasthan that can be cut and mined cheaply and sold abroad for fat profits.

Illegal
The industry employs half a million people. More than a fifth are children who scuttle around mounds of rock in illegal mines with little more than a hammer and chisel. A host of international treaties and domestic laws prohibit child labour in India, but the authorities rarely enforce them.

The landscape in this part of the country is man-made. The rock has been scooped out leaving either veins of precious stone to be excavated by hand or hillock-sized slag heaps to be picked over by men, women and children.

Despite the flood of foreign money into the industry, the way Rajasthan stone is mined has changed little. Mines that have been emptied of their wealth are left to collect rainwater and rubbish.

Most of the work is still family-based, lacking the machines, tools and safety measures found in the west. Experts say one death a day is not unusual in the mining business.

In another quarry, 35-year-old Kanta lifts heavy rocks while her six-year-old son sits on top of a pile of finished stone blocks keeping an eye on his 12-month-old brother. "My husband works [in a nearby mine]. I work here. Where will the children go? My eldest can play with the youngest here," she said.

The families come from tribal communities, who say traditional farming does not pay enough. The site foreman, who does not give his name, claims his workers will not wear the boots and gloves handed out by the mine owners. "They tell us it is too hot to work with these things," he said.

Workers have to pay to secure a job, which some experts say binds the workers to an employer. Kanta had to pay 2,000 rupees for her place in the quarry.

Last year a report to the Dutch parliament found problems relating to "bonded labour, child labour, hazardous and unfair working conditions and a series of environmental issues such as land degradation. [The] global natural stone trade has not yet taken up this challenge in any serious way".

There is also a growing awareness of the effect on global warming of shipping sandstone to the UK. Research shows that British reconstituted concrete has just half the carbon footprint of imported natural stone from India.

These findings are seeping into the buying public's mind. One of Britain's biggest building materials companies, Marshalls, says it became alarmed last year about the scale of the labour abuses uncovered by an internal audit. The company, which last year imported 2 million square metres of decorative paving from India, now buys only from one supplier in Rajasthan, which it has forced to submit to regular inspections and spend £350,000 mechanising production.

"We were frankly appalled by the scale of the child labour problem in Rajasthan. You could also see people on site without hard hats, no boots. Suppliers did not keep employment records. There were no first aid facilities. It was a mess," said Chris Harrop, Marshalls group marketing director. "We insisted these things were put right because our customers are becoming aware of the ethics surrounding the debate. We even point people who want Indian sandstone to a company that will plant trees to reduce the impact on global warming of importing the stone."

Pressure
Many Indian organisations say foreign pressure is essential to change mindsets. "Child labour is a form of slavery which is allowed to exist because there is a lack of political will to do anything about it. We hope that like in other industries such as carpet-weaving that foreign buyers will change these practices in India," said Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of Bachpan Bachao Andolan, a group that works to end child labour.

However, many British companies say eradicating child labour is not a simple issue. The British Association of Landscaping Industries (Bali) said it had an "implied" policy on ethics and sustainability but that members had concerns over how far it should go in terms of child labour. Denise Eubanks, head of Bali's press department, said the instant abolition of such practices could replace "one evil [with a] potentially worse evil where children are forced into prostitution and other criminal activity to help support their families".

Paying the price

82
The daily wage in pence earned by Naresh, 12, for breaking up slabs

100
The number of "gitti" Naresh breaks up in a day, about one square metre

£35
The amount 100 gitti will fetch in a British garden centre

2000
The amount, in rupees, one worker paid to get a job (£23)

2000
The amount, in rupees, many workers earn in a month

400
Thousands of tonnes of rock mined in Rajasthan in a year

When a child is made to do a lot of work which puts the child under severe stress, cannot attend school or is exposed to physical or moral danger, child work becomes child labour, according to the Situation Analysis of Women and Children in Bhutan 2006 report.

Prepared by the National Commission for Women and Children (NCWC), supported by UNICEF Bhutan, the report earmarks child labour as one of the most significant concerns in the child protection context in Bhutan.

Without data or statistics, it was difficult to establish the exact number of children working and also assess the extent of child labour. However, it was concluded based on the attendance of children, assuming that a high proportion of children above the age of 10 who were not attending school as working.

A 2004 National Labour Force Survey reveals that about 24 percent of the children between 15 and 19 years, were economically active - a larger portion of them working in rural areas.

Most children in rural Bhutan worked predominantly in the fields, and young girls, looked after siblings and did domestic chores. Some children also worked on the roadside, often breaking and carrying stones, especially during school breaks or after school hours.

The common practice of young children, some as young as seven years, helping out with household chores, or carrying out light tasks in the fields was fine, even described as ‘positive contribution to their development’, as long as it did not interfere with the child’s basic needs like education, leisure time and an environment to ensure healthy growth.

“But parents need to know the limits to what children should be expected to do,” the report states.
The major concern arose when children, mostly school dropouts, involving the vulnerable segment of the population, came to the urban towns to find employment.

Viewed as a ‘socio-economic phenomenon’ arising essentially out of poverty, an overwhelming majority of working children worked, in often inhospitable conditions in places like automobile workshops, restaurants, hotels, in private enterprises, on the streets as parking fee collectors and largely as domestic help or ‘baby-sitters’.

A survey of baby-sitters in 2004 revealed that young girls, between 11 and 20 years, came from poor rural families with little or no education. Some lived with their relatives, with the understanding that the children would be looked after them in exchange for their work at home.

This group of children, working as domestic workers, was the most vulnerable, according to a Child Protection Study by NCWC that surveyed 29 domestic workers. Most worked for an average of 12 hours a day for Nu. 30, some were subjected to sexual abuse and one had become pregnant.

The executive director of NCWC, Dr. Rinchen Chophel, highlights the plight of these children as a phenomenon which requires more attention and focus. “We must look beyond the numbers revealed and try and put faces to these figures to actually address the issue,” he said.

While the newly enacted Labour and Employment Act which addresses the issue of child labour is welcomed as a boon, most observers feel a strong and a dynamic regulatory mechanism need to be in place. “Or the Act will remain without any action,” an observer said.

Dr. Rinchen Chophel added that with the Act, it should be able to put in place ‘clear cut’ rules and regulations for monitoring and establishing institutions that will ensure proper monitoring. “Children work under various circumstances and to make work environment better for them, their employment should be constantly monitored and scrutinised,” he said.

Bhutan is not a member of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and, hence not a party to its Convention 182 on the prohibition and elimination of child labour, Bhutan has a moral responsibility to cater to every child’s need and rights, said Dr. Rinchen Chophel. “We are signatory to the Convention of Rights of the Child (CRC), and human rights principle says that all rights of children are indivisible, and are interdependent and interrelated, to which states have accountability,” he said.

An effective tool to sever child labour, states the situation analysis report, was to introduce and enforce compulsory primary education. “Even if there is no 100 percent school enrollment, the compulsory law would give the government a tool to monitor children,” said Dr. Rinchen Chophel.

Save the Children Canada Calls for End to Exploitation of Children in the Cocoa Industry

Despite commitments made by Canadian chocolate companies and the Canadian government to clean the cocoa supply chain from the worst forms of child labour, hundreds of thousands of children are still being exploited in the West African cocoa farms, Save the Children Canada said today.

"For five years, we have waited for governments and the global chocolate industry to change child labour practices on the ground in the growing and harvesting of cocoa. We are now calling on Canadians to sign a petition on our web site to tell the government as Canadian consumers of chocolate that we want to do our part in cleaning up cocoa supply chains. In addition, we need a tracking system to clearly identify where our cocoa beans are coming from and the conditions under which they are grown," said Anita Sheth, Senior Policy Analyst for Save the Children Canada.

Cocoa is traded on commodity exchanges in London and New York, thousands of kilometers from the fields where over 1 million children work in West Africa every day to produce it. While the work enables these children to make modest contributions to their family income, they have the right to work for a decent wage and in conditions that are not exploitative. It is estimated that over 312,000 children are currently working in the worst form of child labour in these cocoa farms. "Since Canada imports cocoa beans from Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), we believe all Canadians have an obligation to respect, protect and fulfill these children's rights," said David Morley, President and CEO of Save the Children Canada, who recently returned from visiting cocoa farms in West Africa.

The multi-billion dollar chocolate industry is dependent on West African cocoa which produces roughly 70% of the world demand. Cocoa prices have dropped to 1/4 of their value over the last 10 years making farming families extremely poor. To maintain their margins, farmers look for the cheapest source of labor - and increasingly they find it in the worst forms of child labour.

Children looking for seasonal work across West Africa are sometimes trafficked across the borders of Mali and Burkina Faso into Côte D'Ivoire to work on cocoa farms. Children are lured by the promise of steady work, good wages, and even the chance to go to school. "We must start with understanding where our cocoa in our chocolate comes from, and get choosy about whether or not we agree with the methods used to produce it," explains David Morley. "We are calling for greater investment in the communities where cocoa farms exist.

We want governments, chocolate manufacturers, and individuals to work with us to fund schools, livelihood training and cocoa farm-safety monitoring to change the options available for children and their families."

Save the Children Canada will continue to work with community groups, youth, parents, teachers, transporters and Government officials in the  region to build schools and improve education as alternative to exploitative work, create a network of child protection agents to help child victims, and lobby for an end to child trafficking and exploitative child labour.

http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2007/08/c5992.html

Child labour has not yet been recognised as a social problem standing in the way of education, because of the age-old tradition of child work, members of the civil society participated in during their childhood, according to Professor Sarah B.A. Oloko, formerly of University of Lagos.

She recalled  several seminars held to raise awareness on child labour in the 1980s and 90s, whereby professional Nigerians asked questions akin as ‘what is wrong with work which we did joyfully ourselves?’
“It took some explanation to convince them that significant differences exist between the work, which they did during childhood and what is termed child labour.”

Professor Oloko, who for over 20 years, had carried out researches on child labour in several Nigerian towns, was delivering a lecture on child work and child labour in Nigeria: Continuities and transformation conceptualized child work and child labour as forming a continuum, adding that, “when children, especially young ones are exposed to long hours of work in harsh and dangerous environments which threaten their lives and limbs as well as jeopardise their normal physical, mental, emotional, and moral development, it is termed child labour.”

She submitted that any type of work, which among other things interferes with schooling by; depriving children of the opportunity to attend school, especially when schooling is available; obliging them to leave school permanently; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively hard and heavy work is exploitative.

The erudite scholar- who graduated from Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, studying social anthropology, whose interest in child development crystallized when she became a graduate teaching fellow in the department of social relations and the department of psychology at Harvard in the late 1960s- said however, that when work carried out by children do not involve risks and danger, but rather contributes to the welfare of the children, especially their self-esteem and their ability to be integrated within their families, their work is labelled “work” and not “labour”.

Although there is difference between the two, she made it clear that the line between child work and child labour doesnot have a  clear cut differenec as one would wish in view of the dynamic nature of children’s work especially in the informal sector of urban areas.

“Non-hazardous work may become hazardous in a short while because of changes in the immediate and societal environment of work such as street trading.”

According to the International Labour Organisation, the term child labour refers to the engagement of children below 15 years in work or employment on a regular basis with the aim of earning a livelihood for themselves or their families.

The ILO put the number of economically active children between 5 to 17 years at 352 million (ILO, 2002) made up as follows:

5-9 years old, 73 million; 10-14 years old, 138 million; 15-17 years old, 141 million.
Whilst Asia has the largest number of child workers in the 5-14 age category, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest proportion of working children.

While approximately one out of three children below the age of 15 is economically active in sub-Saharan Africa, the child work ratio in other major world regions are all below 20%.

In Nigeria, according to the statistics on monitoring programme on child labour survey, there are over 15 million working children in the country made up of about 7.9 million males and 7.3 million females of whom at least 7.3 million are in child labour either because they are exposed to 15 or more hours of work daily or because they were found not to be attending school. They consisted 3.7 million girls and 3.6 million boys approximately. Of these numbers, about one million had dropped out of school for various reasons. Of the over 2 million children exposed to very long hours of work (15 hours or more) more than 1.3 million were attending school whereas over one million were not attending school.

Sarah Oloko said children in Nigeria have always worked in farming, fishing, cattle herding, trading and various types of craft work in which their parents specialized, as documented by several ethnographers including Meek, 1925; Nadel, 1933, Leith Ross, 1939. Forde, 1950; Galleti et al, 1956; Green, 1964; Uchendu, 1965,’ Basden, 1966; Hill, 1968; Bascom, 1960; Fadipe, 1970, Smith, 1971; Bradbury, 1973, and Azu, 1974.

“The cited ethnographers and many others perceived participation of children in parental work as responsibility training which was a critical component of socialization through which important values were inculcated,” she noted.

Oloko had identified seven factors in an earlier work that ensured children who worked in the pre-independence and early post colonial era did so in relative safety and if they had the opportunity to attend school, combined it with work without jeopardizing their schooling.

She mentioned the consequences of child labour, the unrecognized suffering and deprivation which confront child labourers, namely physical, cognitive and emotional development.

Poverty is a major cause of child labour, not only in Nigeria, but worldwide. Majority of Nigerians live below  poverty line of one dollar per day. There are very poor families - poorest of the poor who depend exclusively on the work carried out by their children to survive.

Unemployment of primary and secondary school leavers is another major economic reason why many children and their parents prefer work to schooling.

“Because many school graduates including holders of higher degrees now roam the streets unemployed, the motivation for formal education has been greatly reduced. Many families only send their children to school to be partially literate and then withdraw them after primary or junior secondary education - or even midstream - to cottage industries and retail businesses as apprentices or workers”, Oloko asserted.
She also pointed to the educational status of parents as determining the involvement of their children in exploitative work.

“Suffice it to say that illiterate and semi-illiterate persons whose experience of schooling is limited, tend to plunge children into work without sufficient regard for their student role whilst relatively more educated parents either provide remedial lessons for their working children or protected them entirely from work.
Oloko called for urgent action in the eradication of street trading activities of young children as well as their participation in domestic service.

As a way forward, she advised government to overhaul and assess the impact of several poverty alleviation measures on families of working children as a first step towards action to curb child labour. Develop and implement a time-bound plan of action to prevent and eliminate all forms of child labour.

Ensure full implementation of the Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme, particularly covering deprived groups.

Enrich teacher education programmes to facilitate curriculum content, need and methodology.

Incorporate local craft into primary and secondary school curriculum to provide incentives for working children and update the technology under girding local crafts.

ALTHOUGH there is legislation banning child labour, in practice it is not being implemented. We see many forms of exploitation of children, including child labour. The children are made to work at a tender age that could have an adverse impact on their health and mental development. Every child should enjoy the right to education, and an environment must be created to enable children to go to school. Child labour can particularly be seen in industries like brick kilns. A news report has it that hundreds of children from the remote districts are working in the brick kilns in Bhaktapur. Although the factory management is aware that this is illegal, it continues to employ child labour in various forms of work. The money they make is used to supplement the income of their families. Still it is widely accepted that child labour is inhumane, but still this continues, and only half-hearted efforts are being made to stop this.

There are many NGOs that are supposed to be working for these children, but so far they have not been able to prevent child labour. This calls for stringent measures to be undertaken so as to prevent child labour in earnest. The guardians, too, have an important role to play in bringing the practice of child labour to a halt. Many of them are aware that it is not right to send their children to work as labourers, but they still do so. So that the children are provided opportunities to go to school instead of squandering away their valuable time working as labourers, they should be encouraged to enroll in schools. Schools should be opened in all the areas of the country at a convenient location. Education should be made accessible easily, and various incentives should be offered so that the children are enticed to join the schools. Furthermore, many of the children engage in works that are risky in nature. As such, children under no circumstances should be allowed to work in such jobs. Working in brick kilns is also considered risky, and many children have been injured while working there, as they have to take out bricks from the hot kilns. Much needs to be done to do away with child labour considering that there has been no specific project or programme on child labour since August 2006, and there are no specific programmes for child labourers working in brick kilns. This should alert those concerned so that they take measures to eliminate child labour immediately to deal with this form of exploitation.

http://www.gorkhapatra.org.np/content.php?nid=12168

CHILD rights activists have appealed to the public to take in destitute children in order to remove them from the streets of Kampala.

Willie Otim, Commissioner for Youth and Children Affairs in the Ministry of Labour, made the appeal recently at a child-fostering seminar in Kampala.

He said Kampala is currently facing a phenomenally high influx of homeless and destitute children who need to be welcomed into loving homes.

“Rather than sending these children to rehabilitation centres, fostering some of them is the cheapest way of removing them from the streets of Kampala,” Otim said.

He said: “What these destitute children need is to be welcomed into love-filled homes.”

Kampala Woman Member of Parliament Nabilah Naggayi recently accused Karamoja Members of Parliament of being behind this influx, but they slammed her assertions as baseless.

Otim said children who grow up in foster homes have a better chance of survival than those who are committed to rehabilitation centres.

It is estimated that in West Africa, 200,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked each year.

In Ghana, although there is no organised data on human trafficking, according to a 2003 survey report from the Ghana Statistical Service, 2,475,545 representing 39 percent out of the 6,361,111 children in Ghana were engaged in income generating activities.

An estimated total of 1,273,294 representing 20 percent of Ghanaian children were engaged in child labour and over 1,031,220 of this number were under 13 years old.

It is also estimated that 242,074 children were engaged in hazardous child labour and that most child labour issues are linked to internal trafficking.

National Programme Coordinator of the ILO, Matthew Dally observed that it is most essential to generate awareness on the part of the legal community on the mechanisms of trafficking; especially the activities of recruiters, transporters, intermediates and other players in the trafficking ring to enable them develop strategic policy instruments to fight the canker.

The workshop which was organised by the Legal Resource Centre, a non profit NGO, with support from the ILO, was aimed at further enhancing the skills and knowledge of the legal community to develop appropriate legislative policies in combating human trafficking in Ghana.

It is also expected that this workshop will go a long way to facilitate enforcement of the laws and regulations on trafficking in persons in the context of the definition of trafficking as interpreted and understood by the international community.

In this light, the Judiciary has been urged to lobby government to ratify the International Labour Organisation Convention 138 on the minimum age of employment that has been before Parliament since 2000.

"Under UN convention any person below the age of 15 is considered a child and that person is not allowed to work or undertake any hazardous duty,” said Matthew Dally. He spoke with The Statesman during a workshop on Human Trafficking Act 694, organised for members of the justice community. 

Mr Dally noted that although Government has adopted the principles of ILO Convention 138 into the Children Act (Act 560), it has continually hesitated in ratifying the international law itself. “A country is an association of States and therefore when you are a member State, you have to be part of the laws governing it”, he argued. “Although it is important to localise international laws into laws applicable to your society, what if today Ghana decides to change its local laws, does that make it a non member of the international community?” he queried.

He said it is imperative that Ghana ratifies recent international human rights laws pertinent to the protection of children from trafficking, including the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in persons, especially children which supplements the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights and Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography.

In his address, Mr Dally noted that it is very important for members of the legal community to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of trafficking persons in order to support all related legislations. “Members of the legal community need to be familiar with various International Conventions and Protocols used in combating human trafficking”, he added.

Mr Dally observed that it is most essential to generate awareness on the part of the legal community on the mechanisms of trafficking; especially the activities of recruiters, transporters, intermediates and other players in the trafficking ring to enable them develop strategic policy instruments to fight the canker.

Ten years after the signing of the Atlanta Partnership on child labour, what will it take to finally eliminate the practice in the manufacture of footballs? Doug Cahn examines the issues
The Nike public relations juggernaut delivered a press release in the autumn with major news.

But instead of declaring an innovation in sport shoe performance, the latest sports icon to wear Nike products, or the company’s quarterly earnings, Nike announced that it had ceased doing business with a football manufacturer.

Nike explained that it had exhausted all efforts to get Saga Sports, Pakistan’s largest football factory, to comply with its strict workplace requirements including its ban on the use of child labour. The factory, along with its workforce, would have to go.

Only a decade earlier, Nike and other global brands, along with the World Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry, hailed the Atlanta Partnership as the beginning of the end of child labour in and around the industrial town of Sialkot, the football manufacturing capital of Pakistan.

The agreement, named after the city in which it was signed, was the first multi-stakeholder initiative of its kind, bringing together the International Labour Organisation, the Pakistan business community, Unicef and global brands to eliminate child labour.

Under the agreement, the factories would have to submit to independent monitoring. Unicef and local non-profit groups would work with villages that had supplied the child stitchers to ease their transition from work to school and to help families recoup their lost income.

This innovative solution to a vexing problem was not easy to reach. Ball manufacturers first denied that children were used to stitch the balls, claiming that their hands were too weak to pull the needle and thread through the laminated, polyvinyl panels of the intricate ball designs.

A barrage of damning media reports in 1995 and 1996 and then a credible report commissioned by an industry task force at Reebok’s urging shortly thereafter proved the hubris of that defence.

The eventual agreement was a major step forward in achieving respect of basic human rights of children. Importantly, a new model for addressing complex social ills had been born.

Failing to deliver

So what are we to make of the fact that nearly a decade after this landmark collaboration was birthed, Saga Sports has been dropped by a major global brand? Activists in Pakistan have long warned of a resurgence of child labour, pushed into ever more remote villages surrounding Sialkot to avoid inspectors.

In many cases, child labourers simply migrated to the nearby surgical instrument manufacturers. Saga Sports may have been the focus of recent scrutiny but surely it is not alone in its reluctance to shun inexpensive and plentiful child labour.

Knowing now what many of us feared, is it fair to conclude that the Atlanta Partnership failed to deliver on its promise? In part, the answer must be yes. But rather than declare the Atlanta Partnership null and void, the parties to the agreement should examine in detail what went wrong and resolve to strengthen it. In so doing, the parties should take into account four key failings of the original agreement.

The original focus was on child labour alone. Today we know that a range of issues – from protecting the right to freedom of association to safety in the workplace – are at risk. A broader set of issues, identified through a root cause analysis, will better align the Pakistani manufacturing industry to the change that is necessary in order to sustain businesses where workers are treated in accordance with internationally recognised labour standards.

No lasting solution can focus on the football sector alone. A revitalised agreement must reach out to other businesses such as the surgical instruments sector so that a uniform standard of behaviour can be established across the region, eliminating the migration of child labour from one kind of factory to another.

A much more robust programme of social investment is necessary in order to offset the loss of family income from child labour and to underscore the value of education. Economic opportunities in the region must be expanded.

Finally, the quality of the monitoring has been inadequate and must be improved. Better, more sophisticated methods of assessing the adequacy of any future initiative will be necessary. This will be no easy task given the many hundreds of villages surrounding Sialkot.

The best kind of monitoring will come from community or worker representatives themselves. A shift in attitudes that comes from broad-based support for the elimination of child labour throughout the region is necessary.

The achievement of the Atlanta Partnership was indeed an historic moment. What we know now is how limited that achievement was.

The stakes are high. The ability of the Atlanta Partnership to succeed in the face of today’s known failures will inform a range of other experimental yet innovative partnerships to address difficult social issues in developing countries. A reinvigorated multi-stakeholder initiative that will result in sustainable improvements in labour practice in Pakistan, including the elimination of child labour, is now overdue.