Why stopping child labour isn't on our agenda

By Simon Mone

Labour Day was celebrated a week ago. And child labour did not seem to matter on the celebration agenda.

Yet we know that a significant percentage of the world's kids are being forced into illegal employment daily. And continuously endure hard, physical labour. It is because they have little or no choice but to take to hard work or else they will not be able to eat and support families.

This officially makes them breadwinners, because hundreds of families lack people whom they should depend on. A lot of families are headed by children, persons with disabilities and the elderly. So they must earn the hard way in order to provide support. That is why some kids must drop out of school in order to make ends meet.

And many parents do not see the value of educating their kids for the reason that they are not educated as well. Even if primary education is free in many countries these days, children still fail to attend school.

They say that they are not able to afford the cost of; books, meals and transport to school.

So their kids choose to stay away from school altogether. It partly explains the high drop-out rates. Parents who don't see this problem should be ‘locked up' as they are depriving their children the right to education.

Then they might strive to make sure that all kids in their care stay in school. And attain the requisite age and qualification to get meaningful employment. On the other hand, a majority of parents these days are helpless, especially those that have been confined to displaced settlements.

They lack the income necessary to educate their kids. Their immediate priority is to survive the conflict first before anything else. Until causes of their displacements are over, they will not provide for their children's welfare.

So fighting child labour is not on their agenda. They and the kids accept to be doomed to lives of hard toil. That is why a good generation of children are missing the opportunity to get education and emulate their idols.

The lack of security has thrown the spanner in their livelihood works. And also extreme poverty that parents endure now-a-days means child labour is inevitable. And efforts aimed at stopping it are a tall order.

Yet it is our responsibility to end child labour. Also, in some cultures, women are not allowed to work, so they send their children out to do the donkey work and bring food. Go to brick factories, you see a child labourer.

At quarry sites, you cannot fail to see young kids trying to break large boulders into aggregates. In hotels and restaurants, a good number of casual labourers are not of employable age yet. At homes, juveniles get employed as domestic helpers.

Everywhere, you see kids toiling for their lives these days. They try to hold onto tasks that even adults struggle to output. We cannot look further than poverty to blame for one of the causes of child labour.

After dropping out of school, children must look for other ways to survive. In the process, they get a lot of time to interact with their peers, where they are also influenced by bad groups. They link up with drug addicts. And that is how they get wasted away.

Despite regulations in place to ensure that kids are not forced into child labour, the vice has just continued. Enforcement is not going to be easy because for a child who brings food home, their parents will not hand them to law enforcement authorities.

Therefore, any attempts aimed at ensuring that no kid is subjected to hard labour are always going to be unsuccessful. Among the solution, families need the economic empowerment to provide for children in their care.

Then they will ensure that children are not driven into child labour.

The writer is a civil engineer