Price tag on rural children

Children in rural Zambia are increasingly seen as an economic and social resource with a price tag, a recent study by researchers from Coventry University in the United Kingdom said. The study ‘What price children? The added value of children to rural households in Zambia’, focused on Zambia’s eastern province and explored the way in which environmental degradation and accompanying social changes were adding to the poverty and the economic uncertainty in which many rural families live http://www.id21.org/static/5bld1.htm. “These changes are forcing families to reconsider their attitudes towards the earning abilities of their offspring and contribution they make towards a household’s income,” the report said. The study said the region had been badly hit by drought in recent years, resulting in chronic poverty. Coping mechanisms included switching from traditional maize varieties to short-maturing maize, beans and cowpeas. Farmers also switched from largely subsistence farming to cash crops such as cotton. This switch has led to the increased importance of child labour because it is they who do the picking. The report added: “Families without children at home cannot switch to cotton unless they can afford to pay pieceworkers. In the household survey it was found that the only people not planting cotton were elderly people and female-headed households, who had neither the labour nor economic resources to grow such a labour-intensive crop.” The study noted the importance of children’s labour has been demonstrated through the increased resistance to labour transfer between households. “Households strive to maintain their labour pool by contesting the custody of children. Divorce negotiations are now often accompanied by negotiations concerning children’s upkeep and labour,” the study said. The traditional practice upon divorce had been that the wife received a cash sum from her husband and returned to her family with her children. “But recently there has been a growing demand from the husband’s family or the husband himself for the custody of the children, especially older sons. This is recognised to be because of the value of their labour and their future earning potential.” The report continued: “It is a worrying development for women, who have traditionally had control over their children’s labour when they become divorced, and illustrates the way children’s value becomes contested in response to economic hardship.” According to the study, fertility is becoming a negotiated commodity by unmarried young women, giving them and their families access to cash and labour. Men are increasingly “charged” and are either forced to marry the young women or make some kind of financial compensation towards the women and her family. Many of the young women surveyed in the study said there were advantages to becoming mothers before marriage. “Within the community they are seen as adults with full responsibility for a child, can behave with more autonomy and have financial control over the compensation money. However some women accept that men will begin wanting custody of the child at some future date because of its labour value,” the report said. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) there are an estimated 250 million children in developing countries between the ages of five and 14 who work. The ILO says that about 120 million of these children work full time, with the rest combining work and school. The agency notes that about 70 percent of these children are engaged in hazardous work, with 50 to 60 million between the ages of five and 11 are working in circumstances that could be considered as being hazardous.