Full stop to child labour

 Being a child in Sri Lanka is mostly good with the country even managing to halve its child labour statistics from five years ago, according to the latest reports. However, an estimated 43,000 children are still being employed as cheap labour — most of them in ‘hazardous’ sectors.

It was reported over the weekend that a recent survey showed despite tough laws, child labour was being used in farming, herding, producing bricks, mining, carpet weaving, in quarries and construction sites. The silver lining is that compared to the 2008/2009 survey, the 2016 survey shows a 50% decrease in the number of children being used as child labour, highlighting the effectiveness of the measures the country has taken towards eliminating child labour.

A huge part of the problem is children in poor areas, especially in the plantation sector, being used for informal work or shifted to urban areas as house servants. According to the survey report, Sri Lanka has around 4.6 million children in the age group of 5-17 years. Of them, 43,714 were being used as child labour during the period covered by the survey, with some 39,000 working in sectors regarded as “hazardous”.

Under Sri Lanka’s law, children under 14 years of age cannot be used for work and encouragingly primary school attendance is about 96%, which means the bulk of children do receive a basic level of education. However, poverty remains at the core of the problem with many students not having access to education, proper nutrition and a protected environment to grow up in. Many children of plantation areas, to take an example, are not supported to continue their education and are often expected to earn to meet family needs. School dropout rates are high in many parts of the country, including in and outside the affluent Western Province, with youngsters above 14 years engaging in informal work.   

Dealing with this situation requires a multipronged approach. Officials at the provincial and Grama Niladari levels have to be given the resources to visit and document vulnerable children and track their process in a systematic way. These children then need to be connected to a national welfare system, either sponsored by individuals, corporate donors or the State. The data provided by the officials would give a comprehensive understanding of where the most vulnerable children live and how they can be looked after. But right now there is no system or resources in place to do any of this. 

The second solution to the problem is clear: Companies must deploy deep supply chain investigation and remediation. But there is a distinction between ensuring an absence of child labour from production sites and stopping child labour altogether. To eradicate the problem, Sri Lankans must change the social norms and other conditions that foment exploitation.

A third step is critical but is perhaps the hardest of all. Ensuring legal and judicial protection for victims of child labour and trafficking. The Department of Labour reportedly receives an average of 200 complaints each month reporting of instances of child labour but resources to investigate the calls are so limited that only a fraction of them, sometimes as few as nine cases for the whole year, reach the courts. Once there they predictably get bogged down in legal red tape and justice is denied. This same bottleneck is experienced time and again in other forms of child abuse as well. 

International pledges to end child labour are meaningless if they are not backed by long-term plans and sustainable funding mechanisms. But it can be a start to protecting all children from a lifetime of suffering.