Domestic help, plantation work, Prostitution: Many children in Africa have to work and be robbed of their Childhood. Most of them are in primary school age. Experts warn that bans alone will not help.
Fatoumata was only twelve years old when she left her village in Mali to look for work in the city after work. For your parents, education was not a priority, instead it was now early in the morning to get up to rinse for a foreign family, to make the Breakfast and bring the children to school. The work of a mother or a father of a child. “Since four years I do this job. In the various families where I worked, there was often not enough to eat and no good place to sleep for me, I was insulted by my employers,” says the now 16-year-old Fatoumata. “My salary of up to 10,000 CFA Francs (15,25€, n. d. Red.) had to get, I endure all the pain in the world. Sometimes I went back empty-handed to my parents in the village.”
Fatoumata is not an isolated case. Everywhere in the world children are forced to perform life-threatening Work, and endangering their health, safety and moral development. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of children working is as high as anywhere else in the world: One fifth of all African children, approximately 72.1 million, are affected. (For comparison: In Europe, almost 80 million children in total.) About half of them are under the age of eleven, what power Africa’s children to an average of recent child workers in the world.
Forced Labour, Prostitution, Gold Mines
Child labour has many faces. “This is also dangerous, exploitative or physically strenuous Work”, explains Ninja Charbonneau from the children’s charity of the United Nations, UNICEF. “Forced labor, Prostitution, and working in gold mines are just a few examples.” Most of the children in Africa work in Agriculture and livestock, around eight million children work as Fatoumata in the services sector and almost three million in the industry. Often, children is unpaid work, most of them work in small family businesses.
Children work in gold mines in Tanzania
“The damage that the children wear them, is huge, it means an end to their Childhood,” says Charbonneau. “The children can’t grow up to be normal and carefree, so how is that actually your right. Often the result is that you have to go to school. And thus this vicious circle solidifies.” Because without education, the children would come later, poor to well-paid Jobs. “As a result, you have less chance of escaping poverty, and then continues through the generations.”
Minimum working age of 15 years
As Fatoumata thousands of young girls leave in Mali, your homeland, to go to the big cities. The Diallo Assitan Fofana, Chairman of the Association for the promotion and protection of the rights of women and children in Mali explains. “There are migrants, who in the house the large cities will keep working to help their parents in the villages and to provide for themselves. Many of them are not minors, were in school or you have canceled.” Worldwide, the International labour organization of the United Nations (ILO) stipulates a minimum working age of 15 years. However, the international standard is often implemented only partially in the national legislation. So age protection does not apply in Botswana, Eritrea, Kenya, Nigeria or Uganda, the Minimum for children outside of formal labour relations.
In Africa, the fight against child labour appears to be stagnating, According to UNICEF surveys, the number of cases increased from 2012 to 2016, despite targeted measures from African governments.”Many factors play a role here,” says Charbonneau, “but it is mainly the economically sluggish development of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Another factor of conflicts. In conflict countries, we observe that the proportion of children working is increasing the most.” Whether in Mali, Somalia or in the Sudan: The growing poverty forcing children to help to secure the livelihood of the family. “Families are displaced and no longer have your normal income, or main income earner has been killed or from the Rest of the family separated.”
Conflicts and a poor economic situation conducive to child labor: coltan mining in Eastern Congo
Education and fair working conditions
By 2025, the United Nations has committed to end child labour. “But it is not clear that we are there at the Moment, fast enough,” says Charbonneau. And with changes in the law alone, it was not done: “to prohibit child labour in General, it is not enough. If the family is dependent on income, and otherwise Nothing is, then it has done its maybe not a Favor.” Instead, the whole environment and the General working conditions would have to be changed.
Charbonneau called for this purpose, four approaches: “The First is to create effective legislation to prohibit work by children in the most severe Form, and this prohibition to enforce.” Secondly, the circumstances of the families would improve as a Whole: “for Example, there must be a system of social insurance for the case that both parents are unemployed. Parents need to have fair Job opportunities and fair pay, so that the children don’t have to work.” For the children there should be free and qualitative education, so that they remained in school.
Thirdly, there is a shift in thinking in society, so Charbonneau: “You have to draw attention to the fact that child labour is still a Problem and that it is for the development of children is harmful. And the Fourth is that companies need to make a major and important contribution, and the more than in the past.”
Heavy physical work should be abolished as a First effect, says UNICEF
A little progress on a national level
But there is also progress, says Ariane Genthon. She works at the food and agriculture organization of the United Nations (FAO) commissioned as a programme for children working in agriculture. “More and more governments and industries in the agriculture, take measures to the Problem of the children to tackle work in agriculture,” said Genthon. “But this is a complex Problem. And therefore, it cannot be solved with single measures, or only by a state. There is a need for coordinated efforts to combat child labour.”
Nevertheless, countries such as the ivory coast, Mali, and Rwanda have already strengthened the law on the labour protection for children, other governments have appointed new committees or working groups. The Gambian called in 2017, the Ministry of social Affairs National coordinating Committee for children’s work to life. In Benin, organized a new government working group to combat human trafficking a Workshop to develop a national policy to combat human trafficking, an action plan and guidelines for the collection of data. And Mali increased the minimum age for work at 15 years and expanded the list of children of prohibited hazardous occupations or activities.
Employees: Mahamadou Kane