IPEC presents plans on eradicating child labour

A visiting delegation from the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) will present plans to Pakistani officials and employers this week in an effort to end child labour in Pakistan. "We have developed a time-bound programme, which is a more integrated approach to eliminating child labour," Gek-Boo NG, director of operations for IPEC told IRIN on Wednesday in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.

With a view to eradicating child labour within a 10-year period, the initiative would be introduced to Pakistani officials over the next few days along with other ideas on ways of combating the problem. "We are also talking about how to modify legislation to improve enforcement," he said, adding that the situation of child labour in the impoverished country was still quite serious, with children as young as five joining the workforce to help support their families.

Islamabad has ratified seven out of the eight International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions, including Convention 182, signed in 2001, on the worst forms of child labour.

However, the problem continues, and although statistics do not reflect how bad the situation really is, at least three million of 40 million children between the ages of five and 14 are at work, according to a recent government survey. Most of the workers were boys, and 67 percent of child labour was in the agricultural sector, often dealing with dangerous equipment, the survey said.

"We cannot say that it is worse in one geographical location from another, but the Punjab, Sindh and the North West Frontier Province are big agricultural centres," the national programme manager for IPEC-Pakistan, Muhammad Saifullah Chaudhry, told IRIN. Another area of high concern was the coal-mining industry, he said. "Children as young as 12 and 13 are going down as far as 1,000 or 2,000 ft underground in very narrow mines, and these conditions are extremely hazardous and could be life threatening," he noted.

With a population of 140 million, Gek-Boo said tackling child labour in Pakistan was not an easy task. Addressing reporters at a news conference in Islamabad he said that the government must "take ownership of the new programme" and push ahead with solutions.

Asked how realistic the effort to eradicate child labour from Pakistan was, the director of the ILO in Pakistan, Hans J. Lokollo, said: "To eradicate child labour in Pakistan or any other country I think is a very very difficult issue," adding that it was directly linked to poverty, and unless that was eradicated child labour would persist. He believed the government was making progress by introducing a plan to try and reduce poverty from 32 percent to 15 percent within 10 years.

Commenting on measures to curb the problem, Lokollo said it was important that children attended school. "The Pakistani government is aiming to get all children into school by the year 2015, which is very ambitious, but it is a good start," he said.

Lokollo noted that steps taken so far by the Pakistani government had been successful in some areas. "We've been working on a programme for children working in football factories and 95 percent of this industry is now free of child labour. We've done the same with the surgical- instrument making industry, and we are doing the same in carpet making," he maintained.

Although there was some success with children working in rural carpet-making areas showing an interest in education, there was a major lack of schools there, he said. "We hope donors, the government and employers can open up other schools."