Japan and UNDP sign agreement to train former child soldiers in Africa
UNDP Newsroom
17 March 2006
New York — The Government of Japan and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today signed a US$2 million agreement to support an African Union plan to demobilize, disarm, rehabilitate and reintegrate young ex-combatants in the war-torn Great Lakes region of Africa.
Signed by Gilbert Fossoun Houngbo, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa, and Toshiro Ozawa, Ambassador of the Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations, at the African Union’s office here, the new programme will target Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, countries emerging from conflict and transitioning towards sustained peace and democratic governance.
With special focus on girls, it will provide strategic, financial and technical assistance to government and non-governmental organizations offering education; training in carpentry, mechanics, refrigeration, electronics and other income-generating activities; and support for former child soldiers. The initiative will help these organizations better implement, monitor and evaluate activities in the four countries. Also, under the new programme an information, education, and communication strategy will be crafted to enable participating countries to better coordinate national implementation strategies with African Union policy and programme priorities.
“The Great Lakes region is home to more former child soldiers than any other region in Africa”, said Mr. Houngbo. “These young people lack the skills needed to farm successfully, to find a job or to begin a trade and, ultimately, have no way to find their way back to mainstream society. It is an urgent problem and we are pleased that the Japanese Government is bolstering the efforts of the African Union to deepen peace and foster stability in these countries.”
The new programme is part of a broader package of assistance – “Support for the Implementation of the Peace and Security Agenda of the African Union” – which aims to boost the organization’s conflict prevention and peace building capacity by strengthening the African Union Commission, its Peace and Security Council and related institutions. The peace and security programme is led and financed by UNDP and other development partners.
With the new accord, Japan joins the other donors by committing to back the African Union peace and security priorities and contributing to a common resource basket, with UNDP managing the funds and coordinating partners.
“ Japan has been accelerating its support for Africa,” said H.E. Mr. Ozawa. “The project which will be signed into effect today is another example of the Government of Japan’s commitment to Africa. Japan hopes that this project will help the ex-child soldiers who were left to fend for themselves to share in the dividends of peace, and also that the project will further support the African Union’s efforts to advance peace and security in Africa.”
http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/march-2006/child-soldiers-africa-20060317.en?categoryID=349421&g11n.enc=ISO-8859-1
Students look hard at child labor
Nancy H. Gonter
13 March 2006
Shopping just isn't the same any more for Cailey B. Bredin and Lauren A.
Weston.
Lauren, 12, and Cailey, 13, both seventh-graders at John F. Kennedy Middle
School in Northampton, and their classmates had their eyes opened when they
did a unit on child labor in their social studies class.
"When you hold up a shirt and it says 'Made in China,' you can just imagine
a child laborer holding it in the same way," Cailey said.
"You see labels that say 'Made in China,' but I thought they were made by machines," she said.
Lauren said there are certain stores she just won't go to any more.
Students read books about child labor and each prepared a final art project
on the subject. They wrote letters to political leaders, prepared a radio
show and went to a City Council meeting where Mayor Mary Clare Higgins
issued an anti-child labor proclamation, said seventh-grade social studies
teacher Dinah Mack.
"My goal was to give them a view of how kids lived around the world and to
have them develop empathy and passion, and learn that they could take
political action to make a situation better," Mack said.
In interviews, students said they were shocked to learn how children are
forced to work around the world and their treatment by employers.
Garrett G. Welson, 12, was surprised to learn about the dangers children
face and that some of them are killed on the job.
"I try not to buy anything that says 'Made in China,'" Garrett said.
Joel Velez Manley, 13, who wrote a rap song titled "Set Them Free" for his
final project, said he was aware of child labor, but not of how extreme the
conditions were.
"Since we did the project, I've been looking on the Internet and noticing
which brands use child labor and I'm trying to avoid them," he said.
Johanna M. Fleming, 13, created a game show titled "Knowledge Quest: The
Child Labor Edition," which was enacted during a school open house. It
educated people about child labor.
"When I buy my clothes, I think back about what I learned and that a child
might have made this," Johanna said.
Indian groups work to abolish child labor, help educate former youth workers
Paul Imbesi
1 March 2006
According to the India-based Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya Foundation, there are 80 million child laborers working in India. This non-governmental organization has been working for over 13 years to get the message out about abolishing this practice, but it has also gone a step further — it is helping former child laborers by providing them with an education.
The Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya Foundation (MV Foundation) started a bridge course for child laborers who never set foot in a classroom. This course takes in child laborers from the ages of 9 to 14 and puts them into an intensive learning program for about a year. After the year is up, the child is then placed into the appropriate grade.
"The bridge course gives these children confidence," said Venkat Reddy, a coordinator with the MV Foundation. "They are bridging the gap."
Reddy said these children cannot be automatically placed in the same grade with children their own age because they do not have the proper educational background.
He added that it would also be socially difficult for an 11-year-old to be in the same grade as a 7-year-old.
Reddy said that education and child labor are "two sides of the same coin." He explained that education increases the chances of abolishing child labor because it gives these children options, which were not available when they were working.
When the MV Foundation started its bridge course in 1991, there were 16 students. Since then, 60,000 children have been educated. Reddy said there are about 200 former child laborers in a bridge course at a time.
The MV Foundation is headquartered in Secunderabad, Andhra Pradesh, and primarily works within this Indian state. Reddy said that according to the 2001 census, there are 17 million children between the ages of 9 and 14 in Andhra Pradesh, and 4.5 million of them are not attending schools. The MV Foundation considers these children child laborers.
Reddy's organization takes an aggressive approach to child labor. The figure of 80 million child laborers in India — which also comes from the Indian 2001 census — is actually children who are not enrolled in school full time. But by the MV Foundation's account, that alone defines those children as child laborers.
"A child who is not in formal school is a child laborer," Reddy said.
That is just one of the five main points to the MV Foundation's anti-child labor movement. The others are: all children must attend full-time day school, all labor is hazardous and harms the growth and development of the child, total abolition of child labor, and justification of child labor must be condemned.
The MV Foundation was founded in 1985 as a research institution on social transformation and was named after Mamidipudi Venkatarangaiya, a teacher and historian.
Reddy said one of the reasons why his organization focuses on child labor is because it needs to be in the public's eye.
"All these years it was seen as a private issue," he said.
Reddy and his organization still have a lot of work cut out for them. He said that even though the figure of 80 million children comes from the 2001 Indian census, he is not confident the numbers have significantly decreased since then.
One area that the MV Foundation is concerned about is child labor in cotton fields. This labor-intensive work requires children to manually cross-pollinate cottonseeds. They work 12-hour shifts for lower wages than adults.
Reddy said that the job is dangerous because the cotton fields are sprayed with pesticides while the children are working in them. He said the children work without any safety measures, and they handle plants that contain harmful chemicals. Sometimes the children do not wash their hands after work, and the pesticides get in their fingernails, which can cause illnesses like headaches and lack of a menstruation cycle.
"This is very, very harmful. Any work is harmful in our definition, but still, this is very harmful," Reddy said.
The MV Foundation began focusing on this industry in 1992, when it commissioned a study by Indian researcher Davuluri Venkateswarlu.
Venkateswarlu has continued to follow child labor in cotton fields and, in an October 2004 report, he estimated that 83,000 child laborers work in the cotton seed industry in Andhra Pradesh.
A year later, Venkateswarlu came out with his latest report, "The Price of Childhood," which he co-wrote with British agricultural economist Lucia da Corta.
In this report, Venkateswarlu and da Corta wrote that farmers employ children because they work for less money than adults, which saves them money. They also state that farmers can work children harder for more hours, and are not as independent as adult workers.
"Farmers also hire children in preference to adults because farmers can squeeze out higher productivity from children per day: children will work longer hours, will work much more intensively and they are generally much easier to control than adult worker — whether through verbal or physical abuse or through inexpensive treats like chocolate or hair ribbons," Venkateswarlu and da Corta wrote.
Venkateswarlu and da Corta's latest report was commissioned by the India Committee of The Netherlands, the U.S.-based International Labor Rights Fund, and One World Net Germany.
Gerard Oonk, a coordinator for the India Committee of The Netherlands, said it is difficult to free these children and put them into a bridge course because they are bonded by loans.
Oonk, whose group is a non-governmental organization that works with the poor and outcasts of Indian society, said these children go to work for farmers for half of a year in exchange for an advance that their parents receive. After they finish working, then they might go to school for the other half of the year.
"These children are more or less locked up for a number of months," he said. With the bridge course, the MV Foundation is trying to unlock the potential of these children with education, which also gives them something else — confidence.
Reddy said the bridge course also returns something to child laborers — their childhood. "They feel they can compete, they feel they can be a child," Reddy said.
Although Reddy said the MV Foundation does not keep numbers on how many child laborers it has helped from the cotton field industry, he said that the child laborers who come in to their bridge programs feel free.
"The children start thinking that the society is for us. These people are for us. They respect [us], they're not exploiting us. They're respecting our views," Reddy said.
Oonk agreed that the bridge course gives children confidence that was not there previously. With an education, children learn that they have a choice in this world, and they also speak up more for their own rights.
Oonk said that the bridge course not only changes the children, but also changes their parents.
"Parents have not known children otherwise than bringing them up to 6, 7, 8 years, and then sending them to work – not seeing them really as children who can learn something, and develop their own ideas," he said.
Oonk said when children enter bridge courses, the psychological mindset of their parents changes.
"You could imagine that when you use a child mainly as a sort of beast of burden, that you have a different relation to it than when it's a student," he said.
As a result of this education for their children, the parents — who are in a lower caste and looked down upon — feel a greater sense of respect, Oonk said.
"They also have little experience of what life could be otherwise than just working and surviving," he added.
As the MV Foundation continues to fight child labor in India, another cotton season approaches. Oonk said that although the season starts in the spring, farmers have already begun to recruit workers, and children will be among them.
http://www.indusbusinessjournal.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=&type=
Publishing&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle&mid=8F3A7027421841978F
18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=D5DC7AB9526F450D8A82780EAD3B693F
Warning on Nepal child victims
Sushil Sharma
28 Feb 2006
At least 434 children have been killed in Nepal and over 8,000 orphaned in the long running Maoist insurgency, says a leading child rights group. A report by the Child Workers in Nepal Concerned Centre (CWIN) said over 40,000 children have been displaced. Nearly 13,000 people have been killed since the Maoist campaign to overthrow the monarchy began in 1996.
There has been persistent national and international pressure on the rebels and the army to spare children.
Despite pressure on warring sides, the number of child victims has increased, the report said. The CWIN report accuses the rebels of recruiting children as combatants.
Government troops have also been blamed by CWIN report for using children as informers and porters. Both sides deny the allegations.
The CWIN activists say many children have also died while playing with bombs, which they mistake for toys, left unattended by the warring sides.
They say the worst year was 2002 when nearly 150 children died.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4758556.stm
The Street Children of Calcutta
Ross Appleyard
28 Feb 2006
Dressed in a grubby smock, Selma skips over the railway lines, expertly dodging the huge trains that lumber into Calcutta station. The ten-year-old is one of thousands of children who sleep on the platforms and rely on begging, stealing or selling themselves just to eat.
“The only thing that scares me is the jumbo train,” she says. The jumbo train is an ancient wagon that brings bodies into the city from outlying districts to be burnt. It arrives at night.
Selma came to Calcutta three years ago with her mother. Her mother went home, but Selma stayed. “I sleep on Platform 1,” she says. “I make some money from the eunuchs by dancing and clapping for them.”
The eunuchs perform for pennies at the station and pose little threat to Selma. But others do. Calcutta has a burgeoning business in child trafficking. Gangs travel to the poorest areas of India offering jobs or marriage to young girls to lure them to the big city. Inevitably they end up in the red-light districts, plying their trade with lips painted bright red. Many try to look older — some could even pass for 16. These children sell their bodies for as little as five rupees (about 7p) and are brutally abused by the pimps who control them and by the men who often rape them.
Many girls have a familiar tale to tell. Most come from poverty-stricken areas such as the Sunderbans, three hours’ drive from Calcutta. Their parents sell them, in all innocence, to credible-looking men who say that they are looking for a wife or a domestic servant. For about £6, mothers allow their daughters to be taken in the hope that they will get a job and an education and send money home to the family.
The reality is that they disappear into the seedy background of the massively overpopulated streets of Calcutta. Aid agencies battle daily to help the people whom Mother Teresa described as the poorest of the poor, but an increasing demand for young children means that it is difficult to keep up with voracious traffickers.
“We have many projects in and around Calcutta but it is impossible to reach everyone,” says Lisa O’Shea, of Goal, the charity. “Education is the key here. If we can get young kids into schools there is less chance of them falling into the hands of the traffickers and pimps.
“We have built schools in the Sunderbans in an effort to keep the youngsters in the countryside and that seems to be working.” The Sunderbans is an idyllic-looking estuarine system of mangrove trees and rivers. Its name, Bengali for beautiful forest, belies the dark trade that is plied here.
Mamouna ran away when she was 13 in search of a better life, only to be subjected to cruel abuse before she was rescued by police and placed in the care of a charity.
“The people were horrible and beat me. I had no food and was made to sleep outside with the mosquitoes,” she says. Others who run away are not so fortunate.
Girls who are trafficked are moved across India, and sometimes across the border into Bangladesh. No one knows the true extent of the trade but agencies estimate that there are about five million people homeless in Calcutta alone — almost one third of the city’s population.
A massive, sprawling rubbish dump lies on the edge of Calcutta. More than 2,000 attracted by the promise of city jobs call this place home. Foul fumes spew from the muck and everything you touch is covered in a black, oily residue. Overhead crows and hawks circle, waiting to feed on the bodies of animals or people who dare venture inside.
Children hardly old enough to walk patrol the paths through the dump, searching for tidbits that they can sell. They separate paper, plastic and metal into huge piles before carting them off to recycling yards for pennies.
A Goal hostel in Calcutta provides shelter for prostitutes and their children. The working girls are happy that their children are getting an education — albeit that the schools operate in full view of the prostitutes and their customers.
Nina, a prostitute, hopes that her 12-year-old daughter, Hadura, will be able to become a teacher.
“I had no choice,” says Nina. “When I was 13 I was already working in the sex industry. My mother did the same. It’s very common to have this type of family tradition, but I want something different for Hadura.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2061268,00.html
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Coca-Cola suppliers buy materials from Salvadoran companies that practice child labor
Dani Veracity
27 Feb 2006
In terms of human rights and ecology, the Coca-Cola Company seemingly keeps digging itself into a PR hole. The company just can't seem to anger activists enough. It's been accused of privatizing and monopolizing Africa's natural water supply, sucking up India's vital groundwater sources (thereby harming the country's agricultural industry and food supply and polluting its remaining water and soil) and even indirectly condoning Salvadoran child labor that violates local and international laws.
In June 2004, Human Rights Watch published a 143-page report entitled Turning a Blind Eye: Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador's Sugarcane Cultivation, revealing Coca-Cola's use of sugarcane harvested by children as young as eight years old. Though national and international child labor authorities -- including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Protocol of San Salvador, the Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention -- prohibit minors under the age of 18 from doing hazardous or harmful work, plantation owners circumvent these laws by classifying young children and teenagers who work with parents or older siblings as "helpers" rather than the employees they actually are.
These young "helpers" work harder than some adults work in the United States. Though some girls cut sugarcane, they usually work planting "green cane," which is sugarcane that has not been burned to remove the leaves and spines on the stalk. Unfortunately, these leaves and spines often irritate planters' skin, resulting in huge blisters and scars on their hands. Some child workers have the job of carrying tanks of herbicides on their backs and spraying the cane with a handheld nozzle, exposing themselves to dangerous chemicals in the process. However, the majority of child laborers work as harvesters -- cutting burned sugarcane with machetes and other sharp tools. As you might imagine, many children cut themselves in the process. In fact, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) writes, "Researchers saw scars and cuts on nearly every one of the children we interviewed, including some that were still bandaged." Along with these cuts and gashes, harvesters also experience respiratory problems from inhaling the smoky air that lingers in the fields, even though sugarcane is generally burned the day before harvesting to give it a chance to cool off.
Despite these health hazards, medical care is often not readily available on the plantations. At one plantation visited by HRW researchers, a doctor doesn't arrive until 2 p.m., which is much too late for workers seriously injured in the morning. These workers must instead go to the hospital for treatment, and plantation owners generally do not reimburse workers for hospital costs, even though El Salvador's labor code states that employers are responsible for on-the-job injuries. The expense of medical treatment -- though it only ranges from about $1.14 for stitches to $11.43 for "something serious" -- is often too much for these children's families to afford, so many injured child workers go without medical care. Of course, this can lead to extensive blood loss and infection, but these poor families have little choice in the matter.
Though sugarcane plantation owners break these national and international labor codes, the state of El Salvador's economy allows these injustices to continue because many poverty-stricken families have no alternative but to succumb to these horrific child labor practices. As HRW explains, "As with other forms of hazardous labor, children turn to sugarcane cultivation because of the economic pressures their families face. Last modified in 1998, the minimum monthly wage for agricultural work is $74.06. A rural family cannot meet its basic needs on a single wage earner's salary. According to the El Salvador-based National Foundation for Development, the minimum monthly wage would have to be raised by 30 percent to cover a rural family's basic food needs alone." In other words, many poverty-stricken parents allow their children to participate in such high-risk work because it is either that or starve.
Worst of all, Coca-Cola, a major international corporation with the power to make a difference, is allowing these detrimental child labor practices to continue. Its Guiding Principles for Suppliers to The Coca-Cola Company reads, "Supplier will not use child labor as defined by local law," yet these principles do not extend one more step of the supply chain to apply to their suppliers' supplier of materials. Coca-Cola buys refined sugar for its bottled products sold in El Salvador and its canned products sold throughout Central America directly from Compañía Azucarera Salvadoreña, S.A. de C.V's Central Izalco mill, a company that does not violate child labor practices.
However, according to Human Rights Watch, "at least four of Central Izalco's supplier plantations routinely use child labor." When HRW gave this information to Coca-Cola, the company did not deny its validity, instead leaning on the detail that its direct supplier does not use child labor.
Though this response suggests Coca-Cola does not violate its own guidelines regarding child labor, it also makes one wonder about the sincerity of the company's concern over child labor practices.
If the Coca-Cola Company were to recognize this responsibility, it could limit, and possibly even put an end to, child labor on Salvadoran sugarcane plantations. According to a representative from Central Izalco, the mill is Coca-Cola's sole Salvadoran sugar supplier. This means that if the Cola-Cola Company were to withdraw its business until Central Izalco switched to buying sugarcane only from plantations not employing child labor, it would be economically feasible -- if not necessary -- for Central Izalco to comply with these stricter guidelines. This isn't a far stretch, as 35 percent of the mill's suppliers are already under the mill's direct administration. Consequently, since Central Izalco is the largest mill in El Salvador, sugarcane plantation owners would then have no choice but to follow the mill's anti-child labor guidelines, or else risk losing a large portion of their business. If this were to happen, Salvadoran children could regularly attend school instead of missing entire days or the first several weeks or months of school during harvest time and they could focus on homework instead of attending classes after putting in a full day's work from 5 a.m. on.
This switch from child labor to child education could finally change El Salvador's economy for the better. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, "Schooling almost always leads to better outcomes, both socially and economically, than working for children." Due to the very nature of the supply-and-demand chain, the Coca-Cola Company can make this groundbreaking change happen, if it’s willing to put its foot down and demand it.
http://www.newstarget.com/019174.html
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Child labor is not child work
Emmanuel Kihaule
22 Feb 2006
“It's so painful to explain and I don't want to remind myself of the situation that I was in."
This is how Ugandan Alpha Miiro describes the traumatic experiences that she encountered as a child prostitute in the streets of Kampala city. She then bursts into tears.
She has just turned 20 and still recalls the hardships she went through three years ago in search of what she called 'means for survival'.
She was forced to drop out of school as she had no one to pay her school fees.
Her father died when she was just three years old. She only remembers what he looked like because of some photos that she sees at a home where she stays with her mother in Kawempe.
Miiro's mother who is a tailor couldn't pay for her education and at the same time take care of the other three children.
Two of her sisters are now married and a brother is still pursuing his secondary education. The school he studies in is paying for his school fees.
"Life was miserable and sometimes we slept with empty stomachs besides lacking other necessities of life," she recalls.
When asked why she chose to go into prostitution, Miiro says, "I thought through selling my body, I could earn some good money so as to be able to look after myself."
Instead, her expectations ended up being an unforgettable chilling memory that she now has to live with for the rest of her life.
"Men, some of whom were of my grandpa's age slept with me and paid some little money. It was paining but I thought I had no alternative. I sometimes ended up with no pay and I was threatened to be killed if I insisted on payment," she sadly explains.
Miiro lived this way for a while until a friend told her about the Uganda Youth Development Link (UYDEL) at Kalerwe in Kawempe.
UYDEL is an orphanage that deals with the rehabilitation of young people engaging in child labor including child sex workers.
"At first I was reluctant to go to UYDEL because I thought no one would accept me and that instead of helping me, they would simply laugh at me," she says.
However, she eventually went to the orphanage and enrolled in a hairdressing course.
Upon graduation, she was given a hand drier as a resettlement kit and together with other two former child prostitutes, they have established a hair dressing saloon.
"Life has now changed and we're at least able to generate some money for looking after ourselves. We would love to expand our business so as to get more customers," she says while flashing a wide smile.
Miiro is just one of over two million children in Uganda who are forced to engage in child labor and other forms of exploitation due to various reasons, the major ones being poverty and the HIV/Aids pandemic.
The Uganda's Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) says that in 2000/1 alone, there were about 2.7 million children engaged in child labor, which is almost 10 percent of the total population.
Such children are employed mainly in sugar plantations and commercial sexual exploitation among many other dangerous occupations.
Assistant Inspector of Police of the Child and Family Protection Unit of Mbale District, Grace Amongin, says that the most common types of child labor in Uganda are domestic work, serving in bars as barmaids during daytime and later in the night as prostitutes.
Others are smuggling across the borders, loading and off loading goods from trucks, stone crushing, touting in taxis, among other kinds of work.
The police officer says that the war for the elimination of child labor in Uganda is largely impeded by the confusion between child labor and child work.
"Parent's ignorance in differentiating between child labor and child work plays a big role in this because most think that it's normal to engage a child in such activities," she says.
Hamid Kizito, Programme Coordinator of the Rural Development Media Communications (RUDMEC), says that the difference between the two depends on the dimensions and magnitude of the work in question.
"Child work is the one that enables a child to learn how to work and become a responsible member of the society. But the work shouldn't affect the physical, moral, health or well-being of the child," he explains.
He adds that the work should be the kind that doesn't stop the child from going to school and it also depends on the physical nature of the exercise because it's supposed to be of a reasonable and proportionate size.
Child labor is the exploitation of children when they are too young and in many circumstances, they end up getting low payments or no payment at all. He cites as an example a situation in which some children serve as housemaids while fellow children of the same age in the household go to school leaving the former working at home.
http://www.monitor.co.ug/socpol/socpol02222.php
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