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2.1 The cruel dilemma of school or work: Working Out of Poverty

Written by: International Labour Organization

Article Overview: The education and preparation for working life of the current generation of children are of key importance to the drive to reduce and eradicate extreme poverty. Access to basic education has improved in a large number of countries, but the poor have benefited much less than those who are better off. Over 115 million school-age children, mainly in low-income countries, were not in school in 1999; 56 per cent of them were girls. On current trends, a large number of South and West Asian and African countries are unlikely to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of ensuring that all children complete a full course of primary education by 2015.

2.1 The cruel dilemma of school or work: Working Out of Poverty

The education and preparation for working life of the current generation
of children are of key importance to the drive to reduce and eradicate
extreme poverty. Access to basic education has improved in a large number
of countries, but the poor have benefited much less than those who are better
off. Over 115 million school-age children, mainly in low-income countries,
were not in school in 1999; 56 per cent of them were girls. On current
trends, a large number of South and West Asian and African countries are
unlikely to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of ensuring that all
children complete a full course of primary education by 2015.

A low level of educational attainment is not conducive to a productive
working life or to the acquisition of the skills needed to avoid falling into
poverty. As the pace of technological change increases, the capacity to learn
throughout working life is increasingly important. The children of the
poorest families are least likely to have access to primary education, with
girls more likely than boys to be kept at home. Children from families living
on poverty incomes often start work at the age when their better-off counterparts
are beginning to read.

One in six children between the ages of 5 and 14 (211 million) were
doing some form of work in 2000. Of these, 186 million were engaged in
forms of child labour that the ILO is committed to abolishing and 111 million
were doing hazardous work classified by the ILO as the worst forms of child
labour likely to harm their health, safety or morals. The highest incidence of
child work was in sub-Saharan Africa, where 29 per cent of this age group worked. In the Asia and Pacific region a total of 127 million children, or
19 per cent of all 5 to 14 year olds, were working. Only about 10 per cent of
child workers also find time to attend school.

Child labour leads to the perpetuation of household poverty across
generations and, if widespread, slows economic growth and social development.
Untangling the social, economic and cultural dynamics affecting
families’ decision whether a child should work or go to school is an important
step towards effective action to combat child labour and cycles of poverty.

Not all children even in the poorest families work, and many poor
children do go to school. Although there are enormous differences between
and within countries, many parents want to give their children a good start
in life, better perhaps than they themselves had, and believe that the skills
learnt at school are valuable. However, families on the margins of survival
have to weigh this investment against the value to the household of the work
that a child might do. One of the goals of policies to eliminate child labour is
to make it easier for families to choose education over work.

If the option of attending school is in practice not available, families are
much more likely to try to find some economic activity for their children. Access
to school places is therefore vital. This is not just a matter of the distance
from home to school, but also depends on whether the school has a teacher,
books, tables and chairs and offers an environment in which children can
learn. If parents have to pay a fee for their children’s enrolment, in addition
to other costs such as school clothing, books and pens or pencils, this can
make education prohibitively expensive for poor families.

In many low-income countries, the education service is in crisis. Usually
the hardest hit are schools in the poorest areas, often in remote rural regions
where poverty is most entrenched. Teachers go unpaid for months and have
to find jobs on the side to survive. Equipment is not renewed and buildings
not repaired for years. Not surprisingly, poor parents see schooling in such
conditions as a waste of time they cannot afford. Therefore, improving the
education service to give teachers a chance to teach and children a chance to
learn is a priority.

On the other side of the balance, family income is a determining factor
in parents’ decision whether a child has to work. A steady income that meets
the basic necessities of daily life and allows for some savings for occasional
big expenses will make it easier to forgo a child’s earnings. Family indebtedness
is often closely associated with child labour, including one of its worst
forms, bonded labour.

Furthermore, if schooling is seen as likely to help the child obtain a
decent job and, in due course, help out the parents as their earning power
diminishes with age, the education option starts to look increasingly attractive.
The availability of decent work for adults is thus an important determinant
of child labour.

Acting on the supply side of child labour, however, is not enough to
break the poverty cycle in which it is a key link. In many communities, employers
see children, including their own, as a cheap and uncomplaining
source of labour, even though many countries now have laws regulating the work of school-age children.
The vast bulk of child labour is in the informal
economies of developing countries, on farms and in micro and small
enterprises.

Although child labour is found in some large-scale commercial sectors
such as plantation agriculture, many of the businesses that use child workers
operate on the margins of the economy, with simple technologies and little
capital. Children are employed on time-consuming and relatively unskilled
work, and are paid very little. In family businesses and farms, children may
not be paid at all, and most of their work serves to release time for adult
members to increase household earnings. Nevertheless, even in the context
of the family, child labour can be hazardous and constitute a barrier to
school attendance or performance.

Reducing the demand for child labour has both a cultural and an economic
aspect.
In many societies certain tasks, such as herding animals, are
accepted as child work. Some employers also regard employing children as
a social responsibility to help poor families and may offer a sort of informal
apprenticeship in the skills of the business. Nevertheless, the underlying
reason why small informal entrepreneurs use child labour is that the productivity
of their businesses is so low that they cannot afford to pay all the
adult workers they need, and children’s wages are much lower.

Improving work performance and other aspects of small business operations
by raising profitability helps move such enterprises from the margins
of the market to a more secure position where the higher productivity of
better-paid adults is more useful than the low wage costs of less productive
children. Furthermore, if all or most of the businesses in a local economy
start out on a path of improving productivity and wages and employing more
adult workers, family incomes in the community begin to rise, reducing the
need for the supplementary earnings of children.

For many small businesses in poor communities, risk avoidance has
proved to be the best survival strategy. Investing in a new farm tool or an improvement
to a workshop is a big step, which can be catastrophic for the
family if it does not work. The business culture of poor communities, of
which child labour is part, is under pressure from the rapid technological and
economic changes that all countries, including the poorest, are experiencing.

Reforms to make it easier for micro and small businesses to secure title
to their assets are often a vital stage in helping entrepreneurs move out of informality
and into a more secure business culture, where risk taking is rewarded
rather than penalized. Reducing and eliminating child labour is most
likely to be successful where a broad-based community effort to increase access
to schools, improve family incomes by providing more earning opportunities
for adults and change employer and family attitudes to the work of
children are combined with the implementation of laws controlling child
work.

Related Articles
  1.11 Working to end child labour: Working Out of Poverty
  1.5 Skills development for sustainable livelihoods: Working Out of Poverty
  1.19 Building trust: Working Out of Poverty
  1.0 Overview: Working Out of Poverty
  1.9 Building local development through cooperatives: Working Out of Poverty

Article Tags: 14 year olds, african countries, basic education, child labour, counterparts, current trends, extreme poverty, hazardous work, health safety, ilo, incomes, level of educational attainment, low income countries, millennium development, morals, number of countries, perpetuation, primary education, sub saharan africa, technological change



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