Improving livelihoods: Defining child labour

This September the global community will be preoccupied with the status of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as countries embark on the last stretch within which key targets under the eight goals must be achieved i.e. by 2015. Children are central to the MDGs but mainly as objects of a number of MDG goals and targets. Perhaps redefining the paradigm within which young people are perceived and mainstreamed in development priorities should be the primary lesson we obtain from an honest assessment of the MDG experience globally – but especially in Africa. In this article, I will use the example of child work to show why this is necessary and timely.

Until very recently, children in most communities were expected to do some work and contribute to family welfare and livelihood. This may have involved traditional chores like farming, herding, collecting water or fuelwood, babysitting and cooking. Also, it may have involved economic activities such as being labourers in plantations, building sites or markets; being couriers in mines or the narcotics trade; domestic labour; or fishing. Working children are a universal phenomenon among families in the lower socio-economic strata in both rural and urban areas.

In the context of the MDGs, child labour can be appreciated on the one hand as a coping mechanism against high levels of poverty whereby children’s labour is critical to meet livelihoods; and on the other with goals or targets associate with education and health. The question of child labour continues to attract attention in some quarters, particularly in the context of changing and shifting political and economic realities. Activists are concerned with the type, site and amount of work performed by persons under the age of majority. But even their objection is contested.

A Plan International report, ‘ recently posted on Gender Links and Pambazuka about children working in the fishing industry in Lake Chilwa, Malawi heightened such a dilemma. Fishing, acknowledges Croome, is the lifeblood of villagers. When children are involved in activities that are geared at ensuring their own, as well as the livelihood of their families, can it be tantamount to child labour?

Surely, what amounts to child labour if anything becomes relative, if not elitist. The distinction between child labour and child work is evident in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Article 32 of the CRC recognises child work that benefits the family. The article requires governments to protect children from work that is dangerous, harmful or exploitative. There is nothing in the CRC that prohibits parents from expecting their children to help out at home in ways that are safe and appropriate for their age and as long as the work conditions comply with national labour laws. Moreover, children's work should not jeopardise any of their other rights, including the right to education, health, relaxation or play.

Children's work ranges from helping out on a family plot after school or full-time employment. Understandably, a key concern for many child rights activists is who will monitor the conditions under which child labour/work takes place and how will it be monitored. This, however, is a separate topic for discussion best done elsewhere. The concern, at this time, is to explore the possible implications of confusing child labour and child work especially on family and community livelihoods as many families grapple with debilitating poverty.

I argue that in addition to putting the question of child work into perspective, we need to go beyond this and accurately name the practice, not misrepresent it.

What informs my interest? In addition to my training in human rights, I began working for a child rights organisation and have in the course of my activist and consultancy work consulted with a number of child rights entities across the continent. My observations are, therefore, primarily intended to provoke greater discussion on this subject on the one hand, but also to interrogate the motivation in taking up child labour as an issue for advocacy or outreach. Certainly, existing responses are a reflection of what motivates organisations to work on child labour and rarely a statement about the manner and direction African activists propose child work should be envisaged possibly within larger poverty alleviation efforts. My recent experience in Northern Ghana attests to this fact.

I was invited to evaluate a project that purported to stop child trafficking and child labour. There was, however, no evidence of the same in the locality the project took place. Instead, the practice of kayayo whereby young adolescents migrated southward or to other urban centres in Ghana and which the project aimed to arrest at best put children at risk of child labour and trafficking. Such a (re)definition of the problem required an analysis that was candid not opportunistic. And by contextualising the practice of kayaye, it became possible to recommend alternative interventions in support of children about to finish their basic education and who desired to transition to Senior High School but could not afford the fees to continue with their education. Conversely, many children dropped out of school because they could not afford various school contributions required during examinations and other occasions even though in principle basic education was free in Ghana.

To obtain fees it was customary for children to interrupt their studies to work and to resume their education once they had acquired sufficient funds to see them through school. In my opinion the response of the children (and perhaps their parents) was much more realistic and practical than that of project workers and activists who magnified the issue as one of child labour or trafficking. To build an anti-child labour agenda, they lumped all manner of child work such as hawking fruits and other goods as ‘exploitative’ especially if the same interfered with schooling.

Also, condemned were families whose children dropped out to help with seasonal farm work or herding for denying their children the right to an education. Obviously, the motivation of the project and activists was to maintain high enrolment and retention rates in schools they sponsored thereby justifying their project targets and not so much the needs of pupils and their families. Otherwise, how could they fail to realise that in this part of the world, because of how environmental and productive systems were organised, there was a cyclic pattern to school attendance and dropping out? Clearly, perpetuating a schooling system that was stationary and not geared at a population that mobile was not the ideal response in tackling the perceive problem of child work in livelihood related interventions.

Importantly, why did community workers and activists exhibit so much stigma against young people who were trying to exercise some agency, making the most of their unfortunate predicament. My investigations revealed that the children and youth in question would on their own initiative travel for kayaye many times depending on an elaborate system of networks and trust of other village members already active in the sector. Commonly, children sought employment in sectors that they had some competence in, which required low levels of skills and did not involve a lot of bureaucracy, such as farm work – but unlike the work they did at home, they would earn some income from their labour.

Of course, questions will arise about the value of their work and also the terms and conditions under which they are employed. But from the point of view of a young person or a child who needs to see some form of income, these aspects are immaterial. They realise that whatever the promise of an education, going to school religiously will not pay for the uniform they have to wear, the contributions demanded periodically at schools, or their secondary or vocational education. In some instances it will not put food on the table, giving them the energy to attend school.

Africa’s population is youthful, and this will continue to be the reality beyond 2015. In addition to offering its citizens an education that is relevant and liberating, universal health care and an enabling policy environment, positive mindsets are critical to the continent’s renaissance. How can we, therefore, capture and build on the enthusiasm and desire demonstrated by Africa’s youth eager to construct better futures for themselves, to inform larger poverty eradication strategies? How can this culture be sustained such that Africa and its young people, in particular, are no longer associated with parasitic tendencies of dependency, despondency, lack of initiative, vision or poor work ethic?

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* © Salma Maoulidi 2010
* Salma Maoulidi is a GEO (Gender Education Office) member representing the Africa region.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] Among them are The Minimum Age Convention (ILO Convention No. 138), The Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO Convention No. 182); and The Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO Convention No. 182, 1999).