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.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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