Daily Times

Millions of Pakistani children are going through insanely miserable conditions while the world is commemorating the World Day Against Child Labour (WDACL) on June 12 on the theme “COVID-19: Protect Children from Child Labour, now more than ever”.

The United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) believes that the COVID-19 health pandemic and the resulting economic and labour market shock are to having a huge impact on people’s lives and livelihoods. Unfortunately, children are often the first to suffer. The crisis can push millions of vulnerable children into child labour.

This would be in addition to the existing worldwide 218 million children between 5 and 17 years that are in employment. Among them, 152 million are victims of child labour while almost half of them, 73 million, work in hazardous child labour. In absolute terms, almost half of child labour (72.1 million) is to be found in Africa; 62.1 million in the Asia and the Pacific; 10.7 million in the Americas; 1.2 million in the Arab States and 5.5 million in Europe and Central Asia.

Almost half of all 152 million children victims of child labour are aged 5-11 years; 42 million (28 per cent) are 12-14 years old; and 37 million (24 per cent) are 15-17 years old. Hazardous child labour is most prevalent among the 15-17 years old. Nevertheless up to one fourth of all hazardous child labour (19 million) is done by children less than 12 years old.

Among 152 million children in child labour, 88 million are boys and 64 million are girls. Some 58 per cent of all children in child labour and 62 per cent of all children in hazardous work are boys. Boys appear to face a greater risk of child labour than girls, but this may also be a reflection of an under-reporting of girls’ work, particularly in domestic child labour.

Child labour is concentrated primarily in agriculture (71 per cent), which includes fishing, forestry, livestock herding and aquaculture, and comprises both subsistence and commercial farming; 17 per cent in Services; and 12 per cent in the Industrial sector, including mining.

Source for the abovementioned data is Global Estimates of Child Labour: Results and Trends 2012-2016, Geneva, published in September 2017.

Child labour in Pakistan is touching the extreme point undoubtedly, and what makes it more vulnerable is relying on the three decades old data. Somewhere in 1990, it was estimated, I don’t how, that 23 million children are out of school and half of them are vulnerably employed in child labour. The child rights experts say, the 1990 estimates of child labour in Pakistan were merely an estimate based on unverifiable data. However, for the last one year, the UN agencies with the support of government departments are conducting real-time surveys to have a real picture of the child labour.

With Pakistan government restricting the interventions of international development partners in the realm of child rights in particular, some genuinely concerned organizations have packed up their offices from Pakistan and have shifted their development funds to some of the less developed African countries where the child labour is on the peak and child rights are undermined.

Pakistan’s seriousness on the rights of children could be gauged from another factor that the country’s parliament approved the child rights commission Act only in October 2017, seventy years after the day of independence of the country, even that was after a long and tiring campaign by the child rights activists. More heinous was the present government disapproved the hiring of the chairperson for the child rights commission done during the previous government though the selected-on-merit was the best choice then. It delayed the process of chairperson’s appointment for another two years until the federal government appointed Afshan Taseen as the first chairperson of the National Commission on the Rights of the Child (NCRC) a couple of months ago.

Since her appointment, she is struggling to establish an office, to have at least some skeleton staff and some funds to starts crawling. Keeping in view the slow process, one can presume that the National Commission of the rights of the Child (NCRC) won’t be able to move on until early next year (2021). God bless the children from the marginalized segments and communities.

If Pakistan government is dead slow in pursuing the child rights agenda, and found guilty of criminal negligence in combatting the child labour. What we should expect from the international development partners to contribute to the child rights and development agenda when for most of them Pakistan is a forbidden territory. UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) is mainly supporting Pakistan government on decent work and labour rights including the child labour. It was shocking to note that ILO Pakistan’s Child Labour page on the website was last updated in 2010 – a decade back. What does it show that was there no ILO intervention over a decade?

However, ILO Pakistan claims to have run successfully the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) for many years that provided technical assistance to the Government of Pakistan and Employers and Workers organizations for the prevention and elimination of child labour from the country. Stated on the website is: “Child labour is among the priorities of the Decent Work Country Programme (DWCP) that has been agreed by the Ministry of Labour and Manpower, Pakistan Employers Federation and Pakistan Workers Federation. The Government of Pakistan has ratified ILO core Conventions related to child labour: Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138); Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182).

“Under the ILO’s child labour programme various successful initiatives have been carried out in the Soccer Ball, Carpet weaving, surgical, glass bangles, deep sea fishing, leather tanneries, domestic work, coalmines, rag-picking, auto-workshops, and brick kiln sectors. ILO has also responded to rehabilitate child labour in the earthquake affected areas. In all these ILO interventions, thousands of child labours, girls and boys, have been rehabilitated through the provision of non-formal education and related services. Moreover, ILO has helped develop a District Model approach to build the capacity of and provide tools to the District Government to address the issue of child labour at the local level.”

Interesting reality check: many civil society organisations bluntly point out that ILO Pakistan has restricted its collaboration only to the two organisations, employers and workers federations, that is sheer undermining the scope and role of CSOs. Why, if it is so? No clue.

The writer is the Director Devcom-Pakistan, an Islamabad-based policy advocacy and outreach think tank