Child labour project launched

The International Programme for the Eradication of Child Labour (IPEC) has launched a project in Niger aimed at getting 500 children off farms and into schools and technical training centres, an IPEC official said on Thursday.

The project, half of whose targeted beneficiaries are girls, covers five villages in Tillaberi District, southwestern Niger, IPEC's national administrator, Ibrahim Souley Balla, told IRIN. The children, some as young as six years old, work mainly on grain farms, where they are subjected to harsh conditions such as long working hours. IPEC is donating a cereal mill to the area, thus reducing the need for the type of manual labour done by the some 1,400 underage workers registered there.

US $28,000 has been allocated for the one-year project, Balla said. The 500 children are expected to start classes from 1 October, when the school year begins, in the villages of Finari, Ganie, Neini, Foule and Yelwani-Goungou.

IPEC also launched in July a 10-month project aimed at ending child labour at the main slaughterhouse in Niamey, Niger's capital, and sending the children to school. About 350 minors work at the facility, Balla said. Two other projects are soon to be launched. One would seek to release children working in gold mines in Tillaberi. The other, in Birni-N'Konni near the border with Nigeria, will target street children who, according to Balla, are involved in prostitution, drugs and other unlawful activities.

"The situation is critical" in Niger, where only 35 percent of children of school age are enrolled in schools, Balla said. IPEC and its partners are prioritising education as means of alleviating child labour, he said.