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Schooling seen as solution to child labour

Friday, 3 September 1999: As children head back to school, UNICEF has embarked on a 29-nation initiative to combat child labour with pilot programmes aimed at providing schooling to millions of children presently forced to work full time.

"In developing countries, some 250 million children aged five to 14 work," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said. "All too many children are not in school and one in five work in hazardous situations, sentenced to lives of poverty, with an increased threat of disease and early death."

By bringing education to working children, the UNICEF initiative, Education as a Preventive Strategy against Child Labour, hopes to alter the present bleak situation.

"Education can offer an open future, a chance for improved health and safety and, above all, economic opportunity," Ms. Bellamy stated. "Education can counter today's horrendous conditions of domestic servitude, cruel and hazardous labour and outright trafficking by creating alternatives that offer children and their families real choices."

The UNICEF initiative, launched this year in countries as diverse as Morocco, Peru and Senegal, seeks to involve every sector of government and society and includes:
  • Efforts to spur quality primary education for all children, including special educational strategies for working children through flexible schooling hours;
  • Equivalent out-of-school education programmes and other services for children working on the streets; and
  • Support and economic incentives for parents so their children can attend school rather than work.
The initiative also stresses the need to attack child labour itself, including:

  • Efforts to eliminate abusive, exploitative and otherwise intolerable forms of child labour through legislation and enforcement;
  • Advocacy of stricter law enforcement against bonded child labour and trafficking;
  • and Raising public awareness and creating a broad social alliance against child labour.
Core funding for the current initiative is being provided by Norway, with added support from Finland and grant funds from the World Bank.

In 81 communities in Guatemala, UNICEF is helping to make primary school accessible to working children, producing bilingual materials on the disadvantages of child labour and training teachers to deal with child protection issues.

UNICEF Morocco is supporting an analysis of child labour and is providing basic educational materials to child workers, training teachers on children's rights and encouraging parents to send their children to school and keep them there.

In Nepal, the initiative combines early childhood interventions with special education programmes. The emphasis is on identifying and serving youngsters most at risk.

In Lesotho, UNICEF supports the country's first in-depth study of child labour and is working to ensure access to primary education for all children.

"If you provide a community with universal primary education, you essentially immunise it against the worst excesses of child labour," Ms. Bellamy said. "When children are in school, they're simply not available to the most pernicious forms of child labour."

For example, the Southern Indian state of Kerela, where primary education has traditionally been broadly available, appears not to have a high incidence of child labour, even though neighbouring states, where education is less accessible, do.

In Bangladesh, UNICEF-supported programmes have provided non-formal education and skills training to some 1,100 former child garment workers. Over 65 per cent of the young trainees found better-paying employment as a result of their education and training.

Ms. Bellamy added that the UNICEF initiative will be greatly helped by the passage last June of the International Labour Organisation's Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour and she urged all nations to ratify the document.

"The new treaty prohibits slavery, sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and forced labour," she said. "It also outlaws the procurement or use of children for prostitution or pornographic purposes and recognises the special protection needs of girls. The Convention specifically mandates that educational options be provided to working children. Its ratification will be a central event in the movement to end child labour."

Please email media@unicef.org with comments or requests for more information, quoting CF/DOC/PR/1999/36


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