ICCLE - The International Center on Child Labor and Education

Have you ever confronted child labor or any human rights issues linked to it?

Youth Blogs on Child Labor Issues gathers together resources and ideas about the role of eliminating child labor in achieving education for all, fighting poverty, and contributing to world peace and security.

Youth Blogs is informal and represents the personal experiences, feelings and opinions of the bloggers, not the International Center on Child Labor and Education (ICCLE). Your posts are your own, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of ICCLE or its Board of Directors.

You may initiate a discussion about any issue related to child labor.

Name: Mike
Age: 40
Country: U.S.
Message: Given the new figures that show a general decrease in child labor globally, from which areas of work has it been the hardest to remove child labor and from which areas has it been easier?"

Name: Sudhanshu
Age: 47
Country: India
Message: My quick answer is: The most challenging areas of work from which to remove children are agriculture worldwide, domestic (predominantly girl) labor in Asia, Africa and South and Central America, road side restaurants, mining (stone breaking), brick kilns, fireworks and match sticks, and the garment industry, especially in various kinds of embroidery at this time. However, this is possible.

Because of the specific focus on children working in certain industries - such as knitting and weaving carpets, polishing stones, brass ware, bangles and glassware, child trafficking into prostitution, sporting goods, circus, manufacturing surgical instruments, and select agricultural products, such as bananas, sugar cane, cocoa, tobacco, and cotton - these areas of work have been increasingly under radar.

These have been specific campaigns taken on by the Global March over time. It was not easy to remove children from this hazardous labor. However, our work in policy development was important. We built the global campaign to create awareness of child labor and demand an international law on the worst forms of child labor. This campaign led to the creation of the ILO Convention 182. It was therefore possible to lobby for the subsequent ratification of the convention, taken up by us globally. More than 150 countries have now ratified ILO C 182 through their Parliaments. Therefore, it was easy to ask for interventions from the state signatories to ILO C 182. There is now an international instrument available that can be invoked.

Some areas of work, specifically plucking and rolling tobacco in India, harvesting cotton in Central Asia and cocoa beans in West Africa, and working on banana plantations in Ecuador have not been our initiatives. These initiatives were brought forward by others.

Now our central focus entails a multiple strategy; linking child labor to Education for All and the Millennium Development Goals, which encompass everything from poverty eradication (MDG 1) to universal primary education (MDG 2), women’s empowerment, including gender parity in education (MDG 3) and so on. Child labor is the biggest impediment to achieving all of these goals, and so the formation of the joint Global Task Force on Child Labor and Education. This is a new mechanism. Over the last four years this Task Force has developed from an idea to an establishment, which is accepted by Education Ministers from all over the world and all UN agencies.

How can we ever achieve gender parity in education at all levels (MDG 3) until we bring all girls working as domestic workers to school? We have already missed the goal of realizing gender parity in primary and secondary education by 2005! Look at the example of India, which has declared the ban on the employment of girls and boys under 14 as domestic help. This happened only a few weeks back. Now we need to use this example for other countries and, at the same time, monitor the mechanisms set in place to provide education and financial assistance to children and their families after the ban and to enforce the ban.

I hope this gives you some idea of how easy and difficult it is. You know the story of the sporting goods industry – the soccer ball campaign led by us in 2002 – and the circus industry that has unfolded in your presence over last two/three years.

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