CIES Secretariat Florida International University 312 ZEB Miami, FL 33199
Number 150
Eliminating child labor and educating all children:
Notes on the challenges of creating a common agenda
By
Vachel Miller, Ed.D.
Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership
Appalachian State University
millervw@appstate.edu
There is growing international recognition that the goals of educating all children and eliminating child labor are interlinked. Roundtable discussions on the relationship of EFA and child labor began among international agencies such as UNICEF, UNESCO, ILO, and the World Bank in 2003. In 2005, a Global Task Force on Child Labor and Education was established, signaling that the EFA and child labor agendas had become firmly linked at the international level. The task force recognizes that child labor is a barrier to the achievement of EFA, while, at the same time, access to quality education is central to ending children’s participation in exploitative work.
From 2005-2008, I worked as the policy/research specialist on a regional child labor/education project in East Africa (covering Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia). I have seen the value in linking concerns about child labor and education for all. In Uganda, for instance, we found success in the integration of child labor as a theme in the national primary school curriculum, as well as the curriculum of a national teacher training university. In Rwanda and Ethiopia, ministries of education supported the use of alternative basic education to open access for children returning to school after years of absence due to work. At a district and local level in several countries, our project witnessed active collaboration between district education officers and labor inspectors, often through district child labor committees. These experiences gave me confidence that concrete progress could be made in bridging the EFA and child labor agendas.
"Pressed by multiple demands for reform, education ministries tended to have little time to think about child labor issues."
But I was disappointed, at times, that active collaboration was much more constrained at a ministerial level. Certainly, staff from ministries of labor and education would appear together at NGO-sponsored workshops or the occasional meeting of national child labor steering committees. While each ministry acknowledged the importance of the other for achieving common goals, inter-ministerial activity was sporadic and NGO-driven. Pressed by multiple demands for reform, education ministries tended to have little time to think about child labor issues. Meanwhile, labor ministries did not actively engage in dialogue with education planners about how addressing child labor might compliment other national education efforts. A labor ministry might construct a national action plan on child labor calling for expanded school-based feeding programs or improved vocational training programs in rural areas---without concern for whether, or how, such initiatives were being addressed in the action plans of the ministry of education.
In our project, we attempted to engage ministries of education in child labor issues by arguing that child labor was a barrier to the achievement of EFA. We argued that child labor kept children out of school and violated their right to education. Without opening new opportunities for working children—especially those involved in “hidden” work such as sexual exploitation and domestic servitude—to attend school, national governments would never fully achieve EFA goals.
In hindsight, I might make a slightly different argument. Our internal research studies and other reports suggest that child labor may constrain children’s ability to benefit from school, more than it constrains their ability to attend school. A recent analysis of 2005-06 household survey data from Uganda, for example, found that 92% of working children are in school (Understanding Children’s Work, 2008a). In other words, most children who work are already students. For working children, school attendance can be irregular, depending on the seasonal or crisis-based demand for their labor. When in school, they struggle to concentrate because of fatigue and lack of adequate nutrition. Their capacity to learn is compromised. In this respect, child labor is as much an issue of educational quality and meeting minimum learning goals, as it is a matter of achieving national enrollment targets by bringing “hard to reach” children into school.
Would this line of thinking about child labor be a fruitful starting point for collaboration between ministries of labor and education? Perhaps. But there are other challenges. Over time, I began to realize that ministries of labor and education are not natural partners. Labor ministries are typically much smaller, weaker, and poorly resourced than ministries of education. Within labor ministries, child labor units have little institutional muscle to make things happen—whether on the ground, or around the national policy table. Little progress was made in integrating the elimination of child labor into national educational policy implementation and monitoring frameworks.
This separation of child labor and EFA interests may stem, in part, from the perception that the issues belong to different donors. The major international donor working on child labor issues, the US Department of Labor, does not work directly with ministries of education and has little internal capacity for addressing educational development issues. Major education sector donors, similarly, have limited relationships with ministries of labor and have not yet articulated the centrality of addressing child labor for the realization of EFA goals. The core international players may need to become more active in fostering cross-ministerial dialogue and planning to overcome sector-specific activity.
Similarly, there is a tremendous need for applied policy research at the intersections of child labor and education. Most research on child labor tends to focus on its social, psychological and economic dimensions in order to build foundational understanding, guide advocacy, and inform policy formulation. But there has been little attention to policy implementation and, particularly, to the ways in which ministries of labor and education support or ignore each other, as they go about their own business. Where collaboration has taken root, we need case studies that detail how ministries have worked together and the conditions that support active engagement.
More broadly, researchers and policy-makers need better understanding of how a consolidated child labor/EFA agenda can be mainstreamed into national development planning. Because the elimination of child labor cuts across ministerial boundaries, neither labor nor education ministries can bear the burden of solving the problem (Understanding Children’s Work, 2008b). The elimination of child labor—as well as the fulfillment of every child’s right to learn—depend on comprehensive collaboration among diverse government actors that have not yet realized how much they need each other.
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