Ensuring that children have a chance to break out of the cycle of poverty is a cause that has attracted worldwide support. The latest ILO estimates for 2000 are that some 352 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 were economically active. Many, however, were aged 12 years and older and performing light work a few hours a week. Of the 246 million involved in what the ILO defines as child labour, which is to be eliminated, highest priority is given to the 171 million child labourers working in conditions that are hazardous and can cause irreversible physical or psychological damage, and even threaten their lives. The ILO contribution to the campaign to remove these children from danger and offer them a better start in life is significant and has grown rapidly over the last decade.
Launched in 1992, the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) now has 30 donors and operational activities in 82 countries. Backing up the projects and programmes, and feeding into regional, sectoral and global policy debates and partnerships to combat child labour, is a wealth of new statistical information, research, training materials and good practice guides. In addition, ratification of the Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138), has dramatically increased since 1995, while the speed of ratification of the new Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182), is unprecedented in ILO history, indicating both a major improvement in the legal tools for combating the problem and considerably enhanced awareness and commitment. Every four years, a Global Report under the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work provides an opportunity to measure progress and the scale of the challenge ahead.
Combating child labour is intrinsically linked to strategies for the reduction of poverty. As described in Chapter 2, child labour is both a cause and a symptom of poverty. Although over 1 million child workers 42 have benefited from the direct action component of ILO-supported programmes, this is a tiny fraction of the more than 171 million children working in hazardous conditions. It is likely that many more have been helped indirectly by the ILO’s work, but to achieve a future without child labour it is vital that steady progress be made towards the Millennium Development Goals for poverty reduction. Linking the ILO’s work on child labour to the global drive to lift people out of extreme poverty is essential.
Our work has shown the value of a step-by-step approach, working with the government, unions, employers and other groups, that starts by building awareness of the costs to families and societies of child labour and an assessment of the legal and administrative framework. Often backed up by research, this phase helps to develop the political will in government and a constituency of support that drives successful action. Perhaps the biggest success of the ILO’s work over the last ten years is overcoming the barrier of denial.
The action phase involves capacity building and specific projects aimed at releasing children from work, reintegrating them into school and the family, and preventing child labour at its source. By working with employers, unions, teachers, and NGOs and directly with communities where child labour is prevalent, local action groups are formed to design and implement programmes specific to their needs.
There are an estimated 500,000 child weavers throughout Pakistan. An IPEC demonstration project aimed at progressively eliminating child labour in the carpet industry in the Sheikhupura and Gujranwala districts in Pakistan’s Punjab province provides an example of the ILO’s community-based approach. Without affordable schools nearby, most child weavers received no education. Many were illiterate. The project’s new education centres condense five years of schooling into three years, and use interactive “friendly”
teaching techniques to prepare students for more formal education. Village committees of community leaders, carpet contractors, fathers and mothers build and manage the centres and monitor school attendance and performance.
The projects have enrolled more than 10,250 child carpet weavers and their siblings in school, withdrawing them from or preventing them from engaging in child labour. These results have led to the project’s next phase – expansion to the rest of Punjab.
Encouraging as it is, this example also illustrates the challenge of scaling up and replicating the experience of relatively few communities to a nationwide programme. While direct action projects and programmes aimed at the withdrawal from the labour market and rehabilitation of selected groups of children are essential, this is only part of the solution. Even more important, given the sheer magnitude of the problem, is ensuring that the development process includes actions and policies to curb and prevent both the supply of and demand for child labourers. A sustainable and comprehensive approach therefore has to place concern about child labour in the broader framework of a country’s development.
Freedom from child labour is an inalienable right. Eliminating child labour is a challenge to develop accessible, quality education and to tackle the absence of jobs or other sources of sufficient income for parents. Both aspects underscore the need to integrate child labour elimination programmes closely with efforts to improve employment and income generation, gender equality and skills development. ILO Convention No. 182 requires member States to implement time-bound measures for eliminating the worst forms of child labour. Time-bound programmes (TBPs) combine policy-related upstream interventions aimed at creating an environment conducive to eliminating child labour with downstream service-oriented activities at the community level. They also focus on building coalitions at national, regional and international levels to shape an environment in which information, analysis and research support advocacy, as well as policy and programme development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
During 2002, the first three national TBPs in El Salvador, Nepal and the United Republic of Tanzania moved from the preparation phase to implementation.
Programmes in ten more countries are in the pipeline. Capacity building for key IPEC partners and the development of the knowledge base for programme development and implementation are a core feature of the design of TBPs. In this way the TBP concept is designed to meet the need for large-scale interventions in many countries. National agencies and institutions will increasingly take the lead in programme development and implementation, including resource mobilization, with a reduced role for IPEC in the management and execution of projects.
The mobilization of resources is crucial to the extension of the TBP strategy. The scale required puts this outside the means of the ILO acting alone. Beyond the funding possible from national budgets and aid programmes, other options meriting consideration include the pooling of resources through a consortium of donors and the possibility of channelling debt credits into TBPs in countries participating in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative and the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) process.
An example of this is the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy, completed in 2002, which states the Government’s intention to work with IPEC in designing and implementing interventions to address child labour in major towns and to increase funding for the Free Compulsory Basic Education programme.
Other possible sources include grant and loan funding from the international financial institutions.
Broadening and deepening the drive to eliminate child labour, the ILO is promoting national, regional, sectoral and global networks and partnerships of constituents, technical institutions and professional associations that can act to combat child labour. Several interregional networks are being set up, with gender as the cross-cutting theme. The purpose of the Development Policy Network for the Elimination of Child Labour (DPNet) is to promote the integration of child labour action into larger development and poverty reduction efforts. The Hazardous Child Labour Network (HCLNet) seeks to focus the concern of the public and policy-makers on children involved in dangerous work and enlist the expertise of occupational safety and health organizations.
Collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank and contacts with universities are being strengthened. Partnerships in the garment, sporting goods, tobacco and cocoa/chocolate industries have started. They are typically governed by multi-stakeholder arrangements in which the employers’ and workers’ constituencies figure prominently. Beyond consultation and coordination, these partnerships are aimed at a better understanding of the problem of child labour and its elimination, as well as monitoring other core labour rights, and at implementing pilot projects on child labour issues.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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