Scourge of child labour

With poverty on the rise, many families are forced to use the services of their children to survive.

Speaking at a workshop in Lahore, a Unicef expert placed the number of child workers in Pakistan at three million. Other sources have been quoting higher figures. Whatever the accurate statistics, there is no denying the reality that a shocking number of under-age children are working to earn a living for their families. Larger numbers are out of school. This is a pity when the country is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Moreover, there has been a law in place since 1991 prescribing stringent conditions for child labour.

The fact is that laws and legal strictures are difficult to implement when the socio-economic and political conditions do not contribute to improving the status of children. With poverty on the rise, many families are forced to use the services of their children to survive. Socially and culturally child labour has not been shunned — the number of young girls working as domestics is phenomenal and this fact finds general acceptance. Successive governments and political leaders have hardly regarded child labour as a major problem since they derive support from those who exploit children: landlords and business entrepreneurs who look out for cheap labour.Hence the problem continues to grow. Stop-gap measures have been adopted to discourage child labour but these haven’t made much impact.

It is important that a national strategy with the twin objectives of putting child workers in school and lending their families monetary support is drawn up. One approach would be to make it obligatory for employers to recognise their corporate social responsibility and provide schooling facilities to the children of their workers with every student being given a stipend. Other incentives can be found to make it worthwhile for families to send their offspring to school and pull them out of the workplace.