In the summer of 2006, I left the village of Bhoodanatham with tears in my eyes, waving goodbye to the children there. For a week, I lived among the villagers as part of a research trip for a local start-up NGO. I was responsible for collecting information on education and therefore got the rare opportunity to interact with many children in the pre-school and the primary school. My most memorable moment was when I asked the fifth-graders, with my broken Tamil, what they would like to be in the future. They answered: teacher, doctor, nurse, policemen, etc.
Because of poverty, many girls would have to leave school after 12 years old to help with family chores; boys may leave after 15 and become full-time workers in their primitive family fields. I was saddened by the difficulties to access education there – chronic poverty, lack of schools, poor road connectivity and low teaching quality were among the many reasons that have pushed young children out of school.
Now in Cambodia, the issues of education and child labour come back to mind. To provide additional income for their struggling families, many children leave school for work. Some of these children may only leave the school system for short stints (e.g. to assist with seasonal work); but many never return to formal education. These dropouts represent forgone productivity and increased risk of social unrest and undesirable social behaviours, such as violence and drug use. In the long run, the economic implications for Cambodia can be huge. With these concerns in mind, development agencies and NGOs have long tried to reduce child labour. But the complexity of the child labour issue and the nature of children’s work have made such efforts difficult.
The first difficulty relates to the very definition of child labour itself: Which types of productive work (i.e. economic/non-economic; family/non-family) should be counted towards child labour? Which hour thresholds (e.g. one hour each week, one hour each day, etc.) should be considered? On what basis should these decisions be made? Let us use an example. Using 2001 data on child labour, a joint ILO-World Bank-UNICEF study in 2007 found that 76.2% of children have participated in family work for at least one hour each week, while 25.4% worked more than 28 hours each week for their family. These figures indicate that when children work, they tend to participate in family business, such as sowing or harvesting family fields and helping with family-run businesses. Other observations show that more than 50% of children conduct at least seven hours of housework each week; a similar proportion of children engage in economic activities for seven hours each week. However, while almost all children would be exempted from doing housework intensively, 23.4% and 16.5% of children reported doing economic activities for 21 and 28 hours each week respectively. These figures indicate that many children may conduct both non-intensive economic and non-economic activities. But for some children, economic activity can take up 3 to 4 hours of their time each day, which may limit their time to study or to play.
The second difficulty relates to the setting of children’s work. Cambodia is a signatory of the core ILO conventions against the “worst forms” of child labour and has national laws prohibiting child labour below the age of 15. Although the country’s enforcement capacity is low, the non-government sector and the donor community have, to some extent, tried to reduce the incidence of child labour. It is much easier to track children’s work in the formal sector, such as garment factories, registered construction sites and large private businesses. In these sectors, child labour has become less prevalent with time. Unfortunately, most children work in the non-formal sector, which is subject to less direct monitoring and a “natural shelter” of hazardous work. Some such activities, such as scavenging, begging, child portering, souvenir-selling and newspaper-vending, favour child labour because young children tend to solicit more sympathy, request less pay and are more agile. However, without proper registration, it is almost impossible to map out where these children are.
Thirdly, children often fall out of the radar through working within and travelling with private homes/families. Many young girls, for instance, work as domestic workers, taking care of children, washing dishes, cleaning the house and cooking meals. For some girls, the family may provide food and accommodation for the girl. But other girls, the employer may force them to do hard labour too intense for their physical development and may also exploit them physically or sexually. Sometimes, the young domestic helper would travel with the employer away from their provincial homes. It hence becomes even harder for the sending families to monitor the working conditions of their children. In any case, the work activities and conditions of work are concealed by the employers. It is almost impossible to collect qualitative and quantitative information about who are currently in domestic work and the nature of their work unless either the child or the employer voice out.
Last but not least, children workers are more vulnerable to engaging in illegal activities, such as trafficking and prostitution. Poor parents with low education may be deceived by middlemen who claim that their children can engage in more productive activities in cities or abroad. In effect, instead of going through the right channels (there are legal protocols to follow for labour migration, including obtaining the official certification for recruiters), these children will be taken away illegally. Children are also susceptible to commercial sexual activities (CESC), especially in touristy cities like Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. Again, these clandestine activities are hard to trace but children are most likely to engage in work damaging to their physical and moral development.
Indeed, it is disheartening to see children drop out from school and enter the workforce at a young age. But how can we work to reduce child labour and even to eliminate the Worst Forms of Child Labour (defined by ILO Conventions)? I hope to learn more about ways to prevent child labour and to rehabilitate existing children workers as my internship continues.
Resources: Measuring Child Labour: Discussion Note on Country Consultation in Cambodia, Understanding Children’s Work (UCW – an Inter-Agency Research Cooperation Project on Child Labour), March 2007
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