Ratification of ILO Child Labour Conventions ( The Minimum Age Convention, 173 No. 138 and The Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 No. 1820) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, has encouraged many governments to revise labour laws and regulations or enact decrees that abolish child labour and clearly specify the rights of the child. However, enforcement of laws and regulations can prove to be extremely difficult. This is particularly the case in remote, poverty-stricken rural areas. In such locations, child labour is often a result of economic necessity, lack of developmental alternatives and ignorance about its dangers.
Rural farming households and communities in West Africa are often poor and peripheral in terms of social and economic infrastructure or services. Limited access to land, credit, agricultural extension assistance, and veterinary services, means that production techniques remain primitive and labour intensive. Under these circumstances, productivity cannot increase and there is a constant need for cheap unskilled labour, which child workers fulfil.
his article is based on the experiences gathered through the “West Africa Cocoa / Commercial Agriculture Project to Combat Hazardous and Exploitative Child labour”, launched in 2002 in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which set up a community-based child labour monitoring component aimed at raising public awareness on the problem of child labour, identifying child labourers engaged in cocoa and commercial agriculture farming and the risks they are exposed to, preventing child labourers from undertaking hazardous activities and verifying the availability of satisfactory alternatives.
Child labour monitoring: the crucial element of a community-based response
The aim of community-based child labour monitoring is to ensure that children are removed from exploitation and hazards at work, that they are provided with developmental opportunities, and that those removed are not replaced with other children. To achieve this, a coordinated system must be in place to prevent and eliminate child labour. Child labour monitoring in the agricultural sector involves observing and reporting on a range of indicators related to a child’s work, family, health and education. It can also include indicators related to the child’s school and workplace. This entails first identifying children doing agricultural work and determining whether they are exploited or exposed to work or working conditions that put them at risk or are inappropriate for their age. The children are then referred to support services, such as the education system, health care and other social services. The monitoring also includes verifying that the children have been removed from hazardous work and are in school, in training, or are benefiting from other alternative development opportunities.
By regularly repeating the cycle of observations and reporting on the findings, child labour monitoring becomes a means of both preventing and eliminating child labour in a given area. While monitoring of child labour in any context can be difficult, monitoring of child labour in agricultural work poses additional challenges arising from its context: remote rural locations, sparse and isolated populations, paucity or total lack of public or private services and facilities (such as schools), inadequate infrastructure and insufficient political support and resource base.
hild labour monitoring is not intended to be or to replace the government’s labour inspection. Child labour monitors support or supplement the labour inspection system, but do not have the professional knowledge or enforcement capability of labour inspectors. Child labour monitors keep inspectors informed of child labour that is discovered, and labour inspectors may be included in the monitoring teams. Community involvement in identifying and monitoring child labour in agriculture is critical because labour inspectors are usually too few to adequately cover all farms and will therefore confine their inspection to large agricultural enterprises and plantations. A vigilant community can also help to protect children at times and in places where child labour is difficult to detect (such as on small family plots) or where families think that work by children on farms of relatives is normal and safe.
A major consideration in establishing a community-based child labour monitoring system in the agricultural sector is that child labour is traditionally more accepted in agriculture than in most other situations. Therefore, as a first step, sufficient time for awareness raising at the community level is required to transform perceptions in favour of education and away from child labour. At this initial stage it is also necessary to ensure the community has opportunities for participating in planning and implementation. Although parents and guardians may not envision other options for their children besides work, IPEC experience also shows that parents and other adults are often unaware of the harmful impact of child labour on children. Once made aware, they can be convinced that child labour is not in the best interest of children under any conditions.
Once the community-based child labour system is established, regular observation of farms and plantations where boys and girls may be working is a very powerful means of drawing attention to child labour and addressing it. Direct observations will identify child labourers and determine the risks to which they are exposed.
Many levels of society need to be involved, either formally or informally, in a child labour monitoring system for agricultural areas. At each level it is important to have a group or persons with designated responsibility for oversight (such as child labour committees), a group that does the monitoring work (such as the community monitors along with district officials and ministry representatives), and a group that provides advice and support (such as international technical agencies or donors). Representatives of employers’ and workers’ organizations and social welfare agencies or other non-governmental agencies can have significant role at each level as well.
Lessons Learned on Community-Based Child Labour Monitoring
The following remarks highlight elements and issues that were critical to the lead-up, design, start-up and success of the community-based monitoring systems in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire .
Identifying and understanding the purpose – the compelling reason
Designing, establishing and sustaining any child labour monitoring system is a major undertaking involving long-term commitment by government and other key stakeholders and resources to establish, maintain and sustain the system. Whether or not the conditions for long-term commitment and hence the necessary resources exist depends to a large degree on whether or not there is a compelling reason for the child labour monitoring system to be established in the first place. IPEC experience with WACAP shows that child labour monitoring systems that are initiated at the behest of private sector entities often have a clear purpose to verify the status of child labour in their production and to monitor compliance of established criteria or standards by their supplying entities. The financial resources provided for such systems make it possible to establish and sustain relatively more elaborate child labour monitoring systems than those that could be established and sustained by solely public financing.
When child monitoring systems are to be established primarily by governments, for instance for reporting on the implementation of the provisions of the ILO Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182) or other international or regional treatises and obligations, the systems generally need not be too elaborate and rigorous, but they nonetheless need to be credible. Given the limited resources that many of these have, a more feasible alternative would seem to be the integration of child labour indicators into a country’s mainstream social and education monitoring systems. However, such integrated systems tend to be area specific and would not necessarily provide in-depth information related to child labour in any particular sector. Child labour monitoring, whether set up primarily by governments or non-government entities, needs to involve or be linked with labour inspection systems for sustainability.
If the purpose is to establish a simple child labour monitoring system that is to be run and maintained by the community for the purpose of making the community more vigilant about its child labour situation, then it is more a matter of grouping and training community committees rather than establishing an elaborate computerized system for data collection and reporting. Such informal systems can be remarkable in bringing change within the communities and in identifying working children and referring them to school or other services, but they are seldom able to provide or support systematic, credible and reliable information on a periodic basis on selected children or on the overall child labour situation in a specific area. Nonetheless, they can indicate changes in more general terms over a period of time.
Listening to and involving key stakeholders and beneficiary communities
Once the purpose is determined, it is critical to have the involvement and commitment of key stakeholders, including beneficiary communities, administrative units and the various agencies and individuals who will need to facilitate the work. For instance, in the case of Ghana , this included the village chiefs. Intense awareness raising had to be done at the community level to help the communities understand what constituted child labour, what the dangers were for their children, and why education was so very important. At the same time, the voices from the communities had to be heard and taken into serious consideration in the design of the system.
An inclusive and experienced team to lead the consultative process
To consult the various players to be involved and to design a feasible and workable system, it was important for IPEC to put together a team that would bring together, on the one hand, experience from similar programmes, and on the other, voices of the communities, the district and national level players, the employers’ and workers’ organizations, the cocoa industry, and local and international expertise. Together, the experience and the voices would unite to create a do-able model. It was important to utilize the learning from past experience – in this case from the COMAGRI project in Kenya , and to envision a design and system that would be well grounded and adapted to the local context.
Defining and capacitating institutional arrangements and roles
As with any other system, it was imperative that the community-based child labour monitoring system would have realistic and workable institutional arrangements that would provide for clear coordination and supervisory roles and responsibilities. Processes that facilitate the flow of work and communication, and interfaces between the various system components and levels were identified and targeted for strengthening. For instance, resources were provided to enable good communication and contact through visits between the district and communities, training was provided on functions to be performed at the various levels and by various people.
It is clear that the WACAP child labour monitoring system (although rational and logical in plan) depends entirely on the ability and motivation at the national, district and local levels for actual implementation. Capacities of government administrations vary widely within and across countries. Training and re-training programmes, checks and verifications are critical for strengthening capacities, as are means to undertake the work, including technical support, equipment and logistics. In Ghana , the public administration is comparatively closer to the village and rural level than in some other countries, which helps in inter-linkages between the different levels, (field, district and national). This, along with the fact that Ghana was the first country to implement the WACAP child labour monitoring system, might explain the satisfaction expressed by stakeholders involved in the monitoring system there.
Ensuring an adequate social protection system
It is logical and essential that a system be in place to refer child workers, once identified, to schools or other services they may need. In other words, wherever there is child labour monitoring, there must also be a social protection system. A coordination mechanism amongst different actors is also required and should be discussed and formalized prior to starting the actual monitoring of workplaces. Those monitoring child labourers must be able to immediately get the children into schools, vocational training, or skills training, and to link with social services, police and other institutions for special needs. The danger of not having well-coordinated child labour monitoring and social protection systems is that children withdrawn from child labour are left with neither income nor developmentally sound alternative activities.
Confronting the unique circumstances of child labour in agriculture
Much of the child labour in agriculture takes place on small family farms and is deeply embedded and culturally accepted in rural areas. Changing entrenched cultural perceptions about children working in agriculture takes time and requires a lot of sensitization activities at all levels. Moreover, agricultural work often takes place in remote areas, with limited, if any, school facilities and social protection institutions. The low presence, if any, of governmental and non-governmental agencies, workers’ and employers’ groups, and service providers and the low capacity for implementing and sustaining action of those that exist present a major challenge.
It is therefore important to strengthen local institutional capacities to implement programmes and deliver services. A few sessions of training are not sufficient to provide the capacity needed. It is a long-term process. One way to overcome the capacity barrier is to encourage learning-by-doing, for instance by partnering the local agency or group with one that is more experienced. This transfer of know-how is important for sustained action in the rural areas and should be encouraged by governments and development agencies through supportive measures, including technical advisory services. To confront child labour in agriculture, it is also critical for governments to put in more resources towards rural infrastructure, education and income opportunities for adults.
Grounding a monitoring system at the community level
Where the majority of child labour takes place on family farms, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to have a child labour monitoring system that is not grounded at the community level. Such a system also becomes sustainable over the longer term when linked to the district and national agencies and resources which can offer vision, training, tools, and can enable them to contribute to national data systems.
Gathering information comprehensively at the start, does not exclude scaling down afterwards
The pilot monitoring systems set up under WACAP collected comprehensive information. The monitoring questionnaires covered children working, children withdrawn from work and receiving support through WACAP, educational establishments where children are placed or expected to be, and workplaces or employers. Starting with comprehensive questionnaires does not exclude the possibility of scaling them down afterwards. Decisions on which aspects are “essential to know” for a monitoring system at a particular period can be separated from those that are “useful/helpful to know” but not necessarily critical at that point in time. Scaling up and including more questions, once a monitoring system is in place, is more difficult.
Sustainability of an industry-based system
Although the CLMS was successful during its implementation, it is difficult to predict how sustainable the WACAP child labour monitoring system would be in West Africa because the project ended. The cocoa industry eventually did not commit to the system and was exploring other options of gathering information on child labour in the cocoa sector in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire .
Extending the monitoring system to other areas
Extension of the system to cocoa or non-cocoa areas would bring into the fold more districts, covering more child labourers and gathering more information about child labour in rural areas. Each time the system is rolled out to new areas, there will be need for awareness raising, capacity building, linkages and interfaces with the rest of the system. More administrative staff will be required to input data at the district level. More personnel may also be required in the national units organizing and analysing data to produce meaningful results.
Moving beyond figures to planning and response
Collecting data on child labour in agriculture is not an end in itself. Analysing data should go beyond the simple indication of differences in percentages of children engaged in child labour and become a starting point for further discussions and decisions to improve the effectiveness of national efforts against child labour. The next steps in data analyses are for the causes, consequences, patterns and extent of child labour to be analysed, along with highlighting differences between the participating and non-participating districts.
Monitoring data must be used for strategic planning that leads to the provision of services, facilities and opportunities to the children and families in the cocoa producing areas so that children are no longer involved in child labour. If there are particular successes in some districts in comparison to other districts, it is be important to analyse the reasons for the success.
Conclusion
In conclusion, experience illustrates that community-based child labour monitoring can work. It can be as simple and informal or as elaborate and formal as called for by the purpose or reason for establishing it. Child labour monitoring does not replace labour inspection, but it can support it. Therefore, linkages with labour inspection or with other local authority are important from the standpoint of giving credence to the monitoring, providing sanctions if necessary, but most of all for sustaining or even expanding the work once the pilot phase has finished. The implementation of the child labour monitoring system in Ghana has shown that a comprehensive and effective system can be implemented, given sufficient time, capacity building and financial resources. The initiatives undertaken in Côte d’Ivoire showed that, given the political will, it was possible to adapt the community-based child labour monitoring system to its context, even at a time when the country was dealing with challenges arising from the political situation. There is no one system for all situations, but there is sufficient learning to provide guidance as to how such systems can be tailored to specific needs, purposes, and contexts. By the end of WACAP one thing was certain beyond doubt: change for the better had started to take place. In the future, if parents send their children to work on farms, they would do so with serious misgivings and under the watchful eye of the community. They would know that school is the best option.
