SUNS4372 Thursday 11 February 1999

Labour: Will root causes be addressed?

Geneva, Feb 10 (Someshwar Singh) -- The growing demand for child domestic workers is leading to increasing rural-urban and cross-border trafficking in children under the age of fifteen, warns a new study
released here tuesday by UNICEF.

A comparative study of child domestic labour in ten West and Central African countries has found that young children, who make up bulk of the population, are exposed to the "worst forms" of working conditions and girls in particular were vulnerable to exploitation.

132 million children in West and Central African countries are under 15 years of age, accounting for 48% of the population. According to ILO estimates, about 53 million children are engaged in one activity of another.

Globally, about 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are forced to work. 32% of these children are in Africa.

Demand for skilled labour is low in all the countries within the region, as in all non-industrialized countries, whose mainstay is agriculture. Child labour is used to meet the high demand for unskilled and cheap labour.

Over three-quarters of children working in African countries are considered as family help and therefore receive no wages. Such is the lot of 95% of working children in Mali, 80% in Senegal and 70% in Ghana.

Children who do not attend school or drop out of school are naturally sucked into this burgeoning informal sector. These children's involvement in the informal sector activities is the very symbol of child labour in the region.

Mobilized for their own survival, or quite often for that of their family, street hawkers, workers on family farms or apprentices integrated into the productive world of micro-enterprises, African children are not considered by society as children in danger, or even children at work.

Yet, over the years, the West and Central African region has seen a surge in such hazardous child labour activities as garbage collection (in Senegal, Mali and Cote d'Ivoire), stone breaking (in Cameroon) or mine work (in Cote d'Ivoire). More hazardous to the health of these children are the conditions under which these activities are carried out rather than the activities per se.

According to the UNICEF study, it is the tender age at which children start working, the physical and emotional isolation and sexual abuse meted out to them are the most serious and intolerable risks to which working children are exposed.

'Combining all these risk factors, is child domestic labour.'

Working conditions for children serving as domestics include a host of tasks. Over half of the children also do some form of business or economic activity, with working days are, on the average, over 14 hours long, and no opportunities to rest.

Many countries in West and Central Africa recognize the fact that child domestic workers, particularly girls in urban areas are the most vulnerable category facing peculiar risks, and whose status, along with children working in agriculture, calls for priority action.

The major cause of child labour is parental poverty. Economic considerations are strong determinants of child labour. These are forces which push and forces that pull children to work. All the statistics concur that the greater majority of child domestic workers come from low socio-economic status households, characterized by parental illiteracy, and living in disadvantaged (rural) areas.

Parents seeking a better future for the child are encouraged, particularly in rural areas, to place their children in an urban household, accepting the principle, and the risk, of the provision of domestic labour 'in return' since this offers a possibility, no matter how small, of getting the child out of its present condition.

The increasingly organized fashion in which 'agents' or intermediaries are now operating, the study warns, is giving a new dimension to these "child markets." The proportion of child domestic workers who are thus
professionally "placed" varies from one third to 60% - depending on the country or the study.
Prohibiting the trafficking in child domestic workers currently depends to a large extent on strengthening legislation on the movement of minors. However, there are several institutional constraints caused by insufficient material resources, lack of awareness, and corruption.

In the final analysis, the study says, the battle to change the child labour scenario will be long. It will also require too many forces (mainly regulatory and educational), at the local, regional, national and international levels to be working together. And, above all, whatever be the motive power, economic development will have to be the bottom line of any insurance for change.