Child labour - a future blocker
In this episode, Fuzz Kitto delves into the issue of child labour and its consequences. Child labour is not just a symptom of poverty but the cause of poverty. The episode defines child labour and its various forms, including the worst forms and hazardous child labour and draws a distinction between child labour and acceptable child work. Listen to Slavery Unravelled - Conversations about being slavery free wherever you get your podcasts!
Welcome to the Slavery Unravelled Podcast – conversations on how you can be modern slavery free - this is Fuzz Kitto Co-Director of Be Slavery Free.
In this podcast we are going to be looking at child labour as a future blocker.
Defining Child Labor:
Child labour comes in a number of ways.
What is child labour, worst forms of child labour and hazardous child labour?
Child labour is defined by the International Labour Organization as “work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to their physical and mental development” - ILO Conventions 138 and 182 refer to child labour
Worst forms of child labour involves children being enslaved, separated from their families, exposed to serious hazards and illnesses and/or left to fend for themselves on the streets of large cities – often at a very early age.
Hazardous child labour is work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children. It is work which exposes children to physical, psychological or sexual abuse; It includes work underground, under water, at dangerous heights or in confined spaces; work with dangerous machinery, equipment and tools, or which involves the manual handling or transport of heavy loads; work in an unhealthy environment which may, for example, expose children to hazardous substances, agents or processes, or to temperatures, noise levels, or vibrations damaging to their health; work under particularly difficult conditions such as work for long hours or during the night or work where the child is unreasonably confined to the premises of the employer.
Worst forms and hazardous child labour include all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labour, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict.
Not all work done by children is classified as child labour. For instance, children carrying out light, non-hazardous tasks on the family farm for a limited period of time, under supervision, and without compromising their schooling, is considered as acceptable child work.
Child labour in Chocolate industry
We work a lot with the chocolate industry in the cocoa growing side.
The International Cocoa Initiative is a combined company and civil society organisation set up to work on child labour in cocoa growing in West Africa in particular. They explain child labour as a complex issue. The vast majority of cocoa in West Africa is grown by smallholder farmers. Households in cocoa-growing areas face the realities of rural poverty such as a scarcity of land, food insecurity, limited access to quality education, lack of access to drinking water and inadequate health services.
Studies shows that most of the children who work on cocoa farms do so within their immediate or extended family. Not all of this is child labour. However, when such work harms a child’s health, development, or education it is unacceptable according to internationally agreed conventions. This can have negative impacts on future generations and as such we consider child labour as both a symptom and a contributing factor to the cycle of poverty.
Let me give you an insight into this through this story about Karim.
Karim’s story
He could not understand how he could have got into this situation!
What could he do? What was going to happen to him now? In Western Africa in a country called Burkina Faso, there lived a little boy named Karim.
His parents named him that because it means, one blessed with a creative streak. He was a relaxed, happy child. He had four sisters and three brothers and Karim was the middle sibling. He helped around the house and worked with the family around the farm when he was not at school.
When he was growing up, he loved making things and playing by himself. He would take sticks and stones and make patterns with them and pictures and sometimes he would find leaves and flowers to make them even more colourful.
Karim had a favourite chicken called Chookoo. While he made his pictures and played by himself, Chookoo would cluck around him and peck at bits of seed and other food she could find. He liked Chookoo and he particularly liked eating the eggs that Chookoo laid.
He would talk to Chookoo and tell her about all the things he wanted to do when he got older. He wanted his own hut to live in and have a bed rather than the floor to sleep on. He wanted to have nice things to eat and above all he wanted his own bicycle. Then he would ride around the village and out to the fields and discover beautiful things that he heard about but had never seen for himself.
One day, Karim met Aboto. He was an old storyteller. Karim liked Aboto and Aboto was fond of Karim. Aboto was the person that Karim liked to spend time with and would listen to his wonderful stories of adventures in places way away from the village. Karim decided he wanted to travel to some of these places and see the beautiful things that Aboto talked about. He wanted to taste the foods and he wanted to watch the beautiful dancers and artists in Aboto’s stories.
When Karim was about 10 years old, a sad thing happened. His father died leaving his mother with 8 children. Things became more and more difficult and often there was no food at meal times. His mother became more and more worried and the children wondered what would happen. Karim heard his older brothers and sisters say they might not be able to stay together as a family. Karim was very sad about this.
One day a man came to the house and he was talking to Karim’ s mother. He seemed to be giving some advice to Karim’s mother but she did not look happy with what she was hearing. Then his mother called him over. She had tears in her eyes. She said that Karim was to go with this man and he would find work for him to do in a neighbouring country called Cote d’Ivoire on a cocoa farm.
Karim had never heard of cocoa but he was told it was sold to people to make a thing called chocolate that people in rich countries liked to eat. Karim was confused but then he saw the stranger give his mother some money and he saw a relieved look come over her face – but the tears did not stop.
Karim went with the stranger who told him to call him “Uncle”. They travelled around some more villages and other boys from 8 to 14 years old joined this Uncle too. Then they travelled and travelled. Karim wondered if he would see and taste some of the things Aboto had talked about.
They left Burkina Faso and travelled to Ghana which was a neighbouring country and then onto Cote d’Ivoire. These were names that were strange and he did not even know what a country was. But it was different!
They were met at this border by another man who took them in a truck to the other side of the country. It was such a long way! They travelled for days and days. The roads made the truck bounce and jump around continuously and Karim was exhausted. Finally, they got to a farm.
It was a long way from any villages. They were given some boiled rice and shown to a shed with a dirt floor where they had to sleep. From then on, he worked day after day, week after week clearing weeds around the cocoa trees, carefully cutting the cocoa pods off the trees, sprayed the trees with bad smelling liquid and then cut open the cocoa pods and take out the beans.
He got one day off a week, got no schooling and no money. He had no contact with his family either. He got some bad cuts from the knives they had to use to clear the weeds and some more forest and sometimes they took weeks to heal. After spraying with the bad smalling liquid he would become very sick. His eyes would burn and his skin would be effected. He was often wanting more food and had little time to even play with the other boys.
He did not know what the cocoa that they were growing was used for. Some people told him it was for making a thing called chocolate. He did not know what that was or what it even tasted like.
Sometimes the owner of the farm would give them sweets but it was hard work, he did not know what was going to happen and if he would ever get to see his mother again. He longed to hear the stories of Aboto, go to school and have a bike.
How did his mother get tricked into letting him be taken away? How did he get in this situation? What was going to become of him?
Eventually as he got older he planned an escape. A small truck would come and pick up the bags of cocoa beans and he discovered there was a small space under the truck for carrying bags. So during a pickup he hid in there. Eventually they arrived in a town. It took ages for him to get back home because he did not know where he had come from or even what the name of his village was. But after some time the NGO that he was taken to, discovered where it was.
When he arrived home he found that no money was sent home. He had no money for all his work. His family had been split up and his mother was very sick and there was unrest in the country with lots of fighting going on. He was tempted to try and go away to get some work again.
Maybe he would be more lucky this time. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
This is what the desperation of the poverty cycle that makes boys like Karim. Vulnerable to risking getting trapped into modern slavery.
In the story of Karim we see :
· Child work when he was home with his family,
· Child labour when he was taken to work on the farm in Cote d’Ivoire
· Worst forms of child labour when he was not paid, was contained on the farm
· Hazardous child labour when he had to use machetes and chemical sprays
Plus, he had to work long hours, it was harmful to his development and he did not go to school to receive any education.
So, what can you do about situations like Karim?
Take action against child labour
Go to our website www.beslaveryfree.com/chocolate or look up the chocolate scorecard we do at www.chocolatescorecard.com, and buy chocolate from those who are making efforts to tackle child labour.
And support the work of Be Slavery Free, so that we can continue to advocate for children who are experiencing child labour.
In the next podcast we will look at some other areas of child labour and explain more about our chocolate scorecard.