When his father became an alcoholic, fell into debt and was in no position to work, 11-year-old Veeramallu Kesaboina Biksham from India had to leave school to become a bonded labourer.
Biksham is not an isolated case. Today there are more than 250-million working children aged five to 17 in the world, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). This means that one out of every six children is working instead of going to school, with nearly three-quarters (180-million) exposed to work that is dangerous not only to their health, but also to their personal development. Alarmingly, the phenomenon is growing. In India, for example, the number of child labourers is increasing by 12% a year, according to the Centre for Communication and Development.
‘Governments are shying away from tackling child labour because it’s a very complex political and socio-economic issue,” says Abhimanyu Singh, Lead Manager of Unesco’s Dakar Follow-up Unit. ‘But the bottom line is that all children have a right to education. So if we want to achieve Education for All, the issue of child labour must be taken more squarely into account,” he says.
All regions are not equally touched by the problem. The majority of working children live in the Asia-Pacific region (60% or 127-million under age 14).
Sub-Saharan Africa has about 48-million working children and Latin America and the Caribbean about 17-million. Some 2.5-million working children live in developed countries.
What are the reasons for this deplorable situation? Alphonse Tay of Unesco’s Section for Combatting Exclusion through Education points to the lack of resources and political will to fight child labour. ‘We are only dealing with the symptom without tackling the root causes of the phenomenon that have to do with societal dysfunction,” he comments.
Governments are under pressure to abolish child labour and get the children into formal schooling. One example is the ILO’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, involving more than 50 countries working towards the gradual elimination of child labour.
Governments, Non-governmental organisations and development partners are also coming up with education alternatives for working children, such as night schools. In Rajasthan, India, for instance, over 15 000 working children have passed through the night school at the Barefoot College. But is a child who has worked hard the whole day fit to learn? – Unesco