Officials have rescued or prevented 30,530 children from the worst forms of labour over the last three years, an official of the Tanzanian Ministry of Labour and Youth Development, said on Wednesday.

"The trend in the withdrawal of children from worst forms of child labour, which is widespread in Tanzania, is encouraging," Abubakar Rajabu, the permanent secretary in the ministry told IRIN in the commercial capital of Dar es Salaam.

He was commenting on the Time Bound Programme (TBP), being implemented in the country since 2002, with the support of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

The project is aimed at reducing the number of children employed in hazardous jobs such as mining, agricultural plantations, fishing, domestic work and commercial sex.

The number of Tanzanian children aged between five and 17 years engaged in different forms of labour was estimated at 717,677, according to an ILO study conducted in the country in 2003.

"Such work in plantations, mining and commercial sex effect children physically and psychologically, because of fatigue and sense of despair," Rajabu said.

He called on NGOs involved in the implementation of the TBP programme to intensify their efforts at changing lives of the affected children.

Under TBP, NGO officials, in collaboration with government social workers, religious institutions and parents, monitor children working in difficult conditions and motivate them to rejoin the families or join institutions where they could be assisted to return to school.

Rajabu said the government would continue to work out strategies to eliminate child labour by meting out harsh penalties on those found employing children. He added that the government would periodically review its child development policy.

However, he said child labour was a symptom of other serious concerns in the society, such as poverty and HIV/AIDS.

"Some parents look at children as part of the bread-winning team in the family, while some [children] run away from hardships in their homes," he said.

He added, "HIV/AIDS is also responsible for child labour because it has generated orphans, now estimated to be more than one million."

Government statistic put the number of people infected with HIV in the country at between 8 percent and 10 percent of the population. Tanzania has a population of 36 million.

Rajabu said a sustainable solution to the child labour problem should include efforts to reduce poverty and curb the spread of HIV/AIDS.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=46377&SelectRegion=
Great_Lakes&SelectCountry=TANZANIA

Increasing numbers of children in Iraq do not have enough food to eat and more than a quarter are chronically undernourished, a UN report says.

Malnutrition rates in children under five have almost doubled since the US-led intervention - to nearly 8% by the end of last year, it says.

The report was prepared for the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

It also expressed concern over North Korea and Sudan's Darfur province.

UN specialist on hunger Jean Ziegler, who prepared the report, blames the worsening situation in Iraq on the war led by coalition forces.

He was addressing a meeting of the 53-nation commission, the top UN rights watchdog, which is halfway through its annual six-week session.

When Saddam Hussein was overthrown, about 4% of Iraqi children under five were going hungry; now that figure has almost doubled to 8%, his report says.

Governments must recognise their extra-territorial obligations towards the right to food and should not do anything that might undermine access to it of people living outside their borders, it says.

That point is aimed clearly at the US, but Washington, which has sent a large delegation to the Human Rights Commission, declined to respond to the charges, says the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.

Increasing hunger
Mr Ziegler also says he is very concerned about the lack of food in North Korea, where there are reports that UN food aid is not being distributed fairly.

In Darfur, the continuing conflict has prevented people from planting vital crops, he says.

Overall, Mr Ziegler says, he is shocked by the fact that hunger is actually increasing worldwide.

Some 17,000 children die every day from hunger-related diseases, the report claims, which it says is a scandal in a world which is richer than ever before.

"The silent daily massacre by hunger is a form of murder," Mr Ziegler said. "It must be battled and eliminated."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4395525.stm

The government of Côte d’Ivoire has recruited hundreds of recently demobilized combatants in Liberia, including scores of children under 18, to fight alongside Ivorian government forces, Human Rights Watch said today.

Last week, witnesses interviewed in Liberia by Human Rights Watch said that Ivorian army officers and Liberian ex-commanders have intensified their recruitment efforts this month. Meanwhile, the Ivorian government plans to begin peace talks with the northern-based rebels in Pretoria on Sunday.

Child soldiers who had been demobilized after Liberia’s brutal civil war, ex-commanders and community leaders told Human Rights Watch that children have been crossing into Côte d’Ivoire since October to fight with a pro-government militia based around the western cocoa-belt town of Guiglo.

“The Ivorian government is talking peace while actively preparing for war using foreign combatants, including demobilized child soldiers from Liberia,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director Human Rights Watch. “These children endured a horrendous civil war in Liberia. Now they’re being manipulated into taking up arms again in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire.”

On April 3, South African President Thabo Mbeki will meet with the parties to the Ivorian conflict in Pretoria as part of an African Union-led peace initiative. “Mbeki needs to urge all parties to stop recruiting or using children for use in the Ivorian conflict,” Takirambudde said.

The Liberian and Ivorian governments must prosecute those involved in the recruitment and use of child soldiers. Human Rights Watch also called on the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who announced on January 20 that he would send a team to Côte d’Ivoire to lay the groundwork for a possible investigation of war crimes, to include the recruitment and use of child soldiers in the ICC’s investigation. Under the statute of the International Criminal Court, the recruitment and use of children under the age of 15 is a war crime.

In mid-March, Human Rights Watch interviewed 13 Liberian ex-combatants, including four mid-level commanders and eight children, who consistently identified two Ivorian military officers—one colonel and one sergeant—whom they said coordinated the recruitment of Liberian recruits on behalf of the Ivorian government.

The interviewees said they were offered financial compensation for going to fight in Côte d’Ivoire and indeed were offered money for each additional “recruit” they brought with them. They said money was paid to them by Ivorian army officers once they arrived to the Lima bases, and usually after their “recruit” had spent some time with the militia. Others were offered clothing, jobs and lured by the opportunity of ‘paying themselves’ through looting.

The interviewees described crossing the border into Côte d’Ivoire in small groups, sometimes accompanied by the Ivorian military sergeant, and once in Côte d’Ivoire, being housed in one of several bases in and around the western towns of Guiglo, Bloléquin and Toulepleu. Most identified the group for which they were fighting in Côte d’Ivoire as the ‘Lima Militia’ and said it is comprised primarily of Liberians who during the recently ended Liberian war fought with the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL).

“I left Liberia to go fight in Côte d’Ivoire in November 2004 and fought for a full week,” said a 15-year-old Liberian boy told Human Rights Watch. “My commander and I just came back a few days ago. We came to recruit more boys and take them back for our operation.”

While in the bases, they described receiving uniforms, weapons, logistics and training from Ivorian military personnel. All of them described seeing tens of Liberian children—some recruited from inside Liberia and others who they said had been recruited from villages and refugee camps in Côte d’Ivoire—inside each of the militia bases.

Most of the Liberians interviewed had disarmed in Liberia last year and subsequently signed up for education or skills training programs being administered by the U.N.-backed Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) Program. But due to severe funding shortfalls in this program, only a few education and skills-training programs have opened up in regions along the Ivorian border.

All combatants interviewed said they did not understand why the programs and schools had yet to open and cited their frustration as having contributed to their decision to join the Ivorian militia. The commanders appeared to have exploited this and used it as a tactic to encourage ex-combatants to fight in Côte d’Ivoire.

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/30/cotedi10404.htm

City dwellers can spot the young maids fresh from Chadian villages from afar - by their ragged dusty clothes and unsophisticated hair, and the way they shy from the cars speeding up and down the streets.

Teenagers from far-off rural villages are flocking increasingly to the capital N'djamena nowadays to become domestic workers, one of the most elusive forms of child labour as it takes place behind the closed doors of private homes.

"They're aged between 8 and 15, and earn very little," Felicien Ntakiyimana, who works on child protection for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Chad, told IRIN.

In the dim early hours the teenage girls walk in clusters of 10 to 20 along the big central thoroughfares of N'djamena, the Avenue Charles de Gaulle and Avenue Mobutu, on their way to work, often 8 to 10 km from the place where they sleep.

Chadians call them "bey", a corruption of the old colonial word "boy" used for the man servants who in those times catered to their masters' every whim.

In the vast central African desert nation of more than 8 million people, the young girls who come up from the countryside in search of jobs are mostly aged between 12 and 15 and are easy prey for exploitative employers.

"The conditions are very tough, they're worked around the clock and exposed to violence," Ntakiyimana added.

Marcelline Dande, 13, the only girl in a family of nine children, said she came up to N'djamena from the village of Peni in southern Chad in January 2004 in the hopes of staying with an aunt.

But after a week the aunt sent her back to her home in the largely Christian and animist south, where modern ways are increasingly coming into conflict with conservative values. It made the aunt angry to see a young girl off on her own in the city, even more so given she was the parents' only daughter.

Marceelline ran away however and refused to go home. "I joined up with a group of girls from Man-Gueri, a village not far from Peni. They helped me find a job with a Muslim trader," she said. "I haven't seen my aunt since."

She and the other seven girls she lives with get up every morning as soon as the rooster crows at around 4 and splash a little water over their faces to wake up before heading off for work.

They share a small room about three metres by two, sleep on mats on the floor and together pay out a monthly rent of 3,000 CFA francs (US $6).

They don't breakfast. Their one meal a day comes at around three o'clock in the afternoon at work - a bowl of rice or millet cakes.

"I wash the dishes, do the laundry, clean the rooms, sweep the yard, bathe the children, fix breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. I finish around five or six in the afternoon and get home around eight p.m. very tired," Marcelline said.

Such slavery-like conditions have been repeatedly decried by organisations such as UNICEF or the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which reckons that nearly one third of the 48 million children aged under 14 in sub-Saharan African are child labourers.

So why did Marcelline and the others leave the village?

Working to prepare for marriage
"All the girls my age want to come to the city to buy the things they'll need when they're married," she said.

"It's become a shame to stay behind in the village until the day you marry. And here you learn to speak Arab, which is a foreign tongue in our villages," where people speak Sara.

In the big city the girls can find new modern clothes in cotton and natural fabrics instead of the old nylons and synthetics found in the rural hinterland. And there are shoes and aluminium cooking pans, headscarves, earrings and "djalay djalay" waist-beads worn to seduce husbands.

Sarah Kondede, aged 15, is already married but left her husband behind in the village of Dononmanga so she could work for a brief spell in the capital to earn a bit of money. She lives in the suburb of Boutha Al Bagaar, far away from the city centre where she said she worked for butcher Khalil Djallabi.

Her work consists of doing the dishes, sweeping the yard, cutting the wood, making tea and soup, doing the shopping and taking the children to school. "I never stop," she said. "As soon as the boss's wife sees I've finished doing something, she gives me something else to do.

"If it takes too long she insults me and calls me "abit", "noubay" or "sakhrani" (which mean slave, dirty slave or drunk in the local Arab dialect).

Although a maid's workload and schedule may be more or less identical from one employer to the next, the pay varies, as do the conditions.

Sexual harassment is one problem, said Juliette Tore.

"One day, after three months of work without being paid a cent, I was washing the bedroom floor when the master came in from behind, looked at me and touched my bottom. He asked if his wife was about to come home and I said I didn't know."

"This all happened two days before the end of the month. He grabbed me and pushed me onto the bed. I fought and one of my fingers touched his eye. He twisted my arm, hit me and chased me out the house without paying my wages," said the teenager, who is from the village of Bekessi.

Earning a pittance
Other girls, most of whom don't know how to read and write, are accused of theft or of trying to poison their employers, and sacked.

"But they're all lies," said Kondede. "All they want to do is send us off without pay."

Their wages are among the lowest in Chad, the world's 11th poorest nation where two out of three citizens live below the poverty line, according to the 2004 UN Human Development Index.

Ntakiyimana said monthly pay averages between 5,000 to 15,000 CFA francs (US $10 to 30), but when the cost of broken glasses or plates, or fines for being late, are subtracted from the total "sometimes you only earn 6,000 or 7,000 CFA francs", said Kondede.

One employer of a teenage maid brushed off all criticism, saying the girls were being done a favour by working in big N'djamena homes.

"If people don't discuss the offer you make, what're you supposed to do as an employer?' said Younous Abba, who lives on 40 Metre Street, which is home to many Arab traders.
"They don't even know how to clean or prepare clothes. They're peasants. We are giving them help," he added.
But one of the leaders of the Chad domestic workers' association said the labour authorities were at fault for failing to control wages and labour contracts.

"The authorities don't check on the domestic workers," said Kaguere Hamit.

"Nothing is inspected in this country, including work contracts. The minimum wage is 28,500 CFA francs (US $57) so how can people hire workers for 10,000 or 15,000?"

The Chad government in fact has adopted the International Labour Organisation child labour convention to protect against the exploitation of children. And, an inter-ministerial committee currently is working on a text to tackle the problem of child domestic workers, officials said.

The lure of money in the big city also exposes the youngsters to sexually transmitted diseases.

"Many people believe the girls are still healthy because they're 'ja min khadi' (which means literally 'straight from the village'), meaning that condoms aren't required," said journalist Diponbe Payebe of the weekly Le Temps. And more and more often, at food and drink stalls across the capital, men come looking for a "ja min khadi'.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/1967a887091a65ea1240472194f32cde.htm

As tourists wander among the majestic Angkor Wat stone ruins, they are sometimes serenaded by haunting Cambodian music, played by musicians who have lost one or both of their legs and who now survive on donations. Visitors may also be approached by eager children who sell postcards and guidebooks and sometimes ask for one dollar bills.

The amputees and ''working'' children are an indication that Cambodia has ''a past full of sadness'' and still needs to go a long way to solve its problems, as the country's Prime Minister Hun Sen said Wednesday.

In a lengthy and impassioned speech at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)- sponsored Seventh East Asia and Pacific Ministerial Consultation on Children here, Hun Sen declared that Cambodia had the most ''child victims'' because of ''mistakes'' committed by political leaders.

Cambodia is a country that is still haunted by its past and its psychic wounds are still raw. The best current estimate is that 1.7 million people died of starvation, forced labor, disease or execution during the Khmer Rouge era, from 1975 to 1979.

''After the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia was left with the most orphans in the world,'' Hun Sen told more than 200 officials, development experts and members of private aid groups at the opening of three days of ministerial level talks on the plight of children. Cambodia is the host of these talks.

The controversial prime minister, who was initially a member of the Khmer Rouge but then fought to liberate the country from Pol Pot's rule, declared that it had taken 29 years to solve the problems created by military conflict.

But he added Cambodia still faced problems like child trafficking and sex tourism.

The Cambodian government, however, is making a concerted effort to fight both.

''The Royal Government has introduced necessary measures to prevent child trafficking and is cracking down on businesses using under-aged children as labourers,'' said Hun Sen.

The ministerial level talks, also known as MINCON, is the only high-level meeting of its type dedicated to children, and it has been held every two years since 1991, a year after the World Summit for Children. This year's focus is on disparity, adolescence and survival.

''Evidence indicates that inequities and disparities are increasing in this region. The fruits of growth have not been equally shared. Many families are deprived of access to basic social services that are fundamental to the fulfillment of their rights,'' said Carol Bellamy, UNICEF's executive director.

''Those in the line of fire are most often adolescents and young people, who form a growing segment of the region's population and yet remain among the most marginalized,'' she added.

''If we want to tackle disparities and achieve more equitable development, we have to invest more in children. The region, for example, spends much less per capita than the global average on public health,'' Bellamy pointed out. ''I urge governments to increase public spending in health and education and to target these investments to communities where disparities are high.''

Disparity is being given special emphasis, and when one compares indicators for Cambodia and richer countries in the region one can see why this issue, which UNICEF's Bellamy has called the ''ugly underbelly of prosperity in East Asia'', is so important. According to United Nations statistics, 34 per cent of Cambodia's population lives on less than one dollar a day, compared with two per cent for Thailand.

The U.N. also says that Cambodia's mortality rate for children under five years of age is 140 for every 1,000 live births in 2003, compared with 26 for every 1,000 in Thailand. And the life expectancy at birth is 57 years for Cambodia, compared with 69 for Thailand.

But perhaps the biggest threat facing children in Cambodia is that of political instability and military conflict. Hun Sen said that the effects of these were harder to deal with than natural disasters, such as the tsunami that devastated parts of Asia three months ago.

''We can solve the problems caused by tsunamis in a few years, but it takes many years to solve problems caused by war,'' the prime minister declared, after expressing his condolences to ''those governments and their people who suffered from the tsunami recently where many babies and children lost their lives and also many children were left without parents''.

In Cambodia, the effects of conflict are still felt every day.

According to Rodney Hatfield, UNICEF's Cambodia representative, more than 1,000 casualties occur each year from landmines and unexploded ordinance.

''This figure goes up when there is an increase in the price of scrap metal, as people look for old bombs made of good quality steel to sell,'' said Hatfield. ''There are many such devices lying around as half a million tons of bombs were dropped on Cambodia by the United States.''

Despite such grim statistics, Hatfield is optimistic that real progress is being made to reduce poverty and consequently improve the condition of children in the country.

''If we can't do something in Cambodia, I don't know where we can,'' he said. ''There is progress and there is potential for progress. There is an awful lot to do, but it's not hopeless.''

http://ipsnews.net/new_nota.asp?idnews=27984

It's late afternoon in the Tender Sprouts orphanage at Puthukkudiyiruppu, in Tamil Tiger-controlled north-eastern Sri Lanka. A group of children hold hands as they form a large circle in the playground, swaying gently as they sing.

These sessions are part of an effort to help these children forget that awful December day, when the giant tsunami wave swept through their orphanage located at the time on the coast. "It's a very important part of their day," says camp co-ordinator Ragini. Through singing, dancing and play acting we try to get them to be positive about their present situation, and look on the bright side."

Moving on
That may seem to be an impossible task for these children, many of whom were orphaned during the long years of civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan government. And the recent upheaval has not helped.

This is the third location the school has been moved to - the earlier one was a mental hospital in Kilinochchi, further inland. But despite the trauma, counsellors and teachers say the children have learnt to cope and are moving on.

Krishantini is a bright-eyed 11-year-old, who is currently in grade six. "I enjoy my classes, particularly Tamil - I love listening to stories," she says shyly. Her friends say she is also good at storytelling and often spends nights relating them to other children. But she refuses to talk about the tsunami except to say she is scared of the sea.

Role-play
Romesh is one of several Jaffna University drama students who have been roped in to help the children get over their trauma through role-play. "Our main effort now is to get them to focus on normal, everyday things. "Some of them still have very dark memories - we don't repress them but we don't always want them to focus on them either," he says.

In the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, aid workers and the church began the task of helping children in the tsunami-affected areas deal with their tragedy. "Irish nurses and priests who had come here would encourage the children to sing, dance and draw," says Sister Hilda, principal of Mullaitivu school. Since then, the education department of the provincial government has picked up the mantle of helping the healing process.

"The main idea is to allow them to express their emotions while giving them hope," adds Sister Hilda.

Eager to learn
But there is also an attempt to bring a sense of normality back to their lives. In the Mullaitivu school, children pour over their books as they prepare for their annual examinations. Classes are held in large tents, provided by Unicef, which house several classes side by side. Lectures in mathematics, geography and science take place simultaneously.

Some of the classes spill outdoors, with children grouped around a teacher under the shade of a tree. "We make do with what we have," says Dayanand, who teaches science and mathematics. "They are very keen to learn and to make up for lost time."

But despite the reassuring routine of school and playtime romps, it is not easy to forget. "Many of the children still cry at night or wake up with bad dreams," says Tender Sprout camp co-ordinator Ragini. For some like 14-year-old Shantini, who lost both her sisters, the memories have been pushed deep down.

"When someone asks me about my sisters, I say they are staying with family somewhere else," she says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4360573.stm

A recent statement by the Kenyan government that many students who graduated from primary school last year will not find places in the country's secondary schools has generated widespread concern.

According to Education, Science and Technology Minister George Saitioti, 657,747 pu