Southern African Child Labour Link: September 2007

Click here to download the front page of the newsletter, in PDF

The front page offers a one-page summary on all the stories below.

Read below about ...

Regulations on hazardous work ready for public comment

South Africa’s draft regulations on hazardous work and children are to be published for comment by the end of the year.

There are two sets of regulations, made in terms of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act respectively. The Basic Conditions of Employment Act prohibits employment of children until the end of the school year in which the child turns 15. The draft regulations aim especially to protect children who have reached the minimum working age.

Those relating to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act:

Identify certain types of work that may not be performed by anyone under 18 years under any conditions.
Protect children under 15 years who are doing work outside of formal employment by imposing conditions on such work.
Protect children who are over the minimum working age and may legally be employed, once again by setting clear working conditions.

Work that is banned for all persons under 18 years is divided into two categories:

Prohibited work.
Worst forms of child labour.

Higher sentences for worst forms of child labour

Where an individual not only flouts the regulations but, in the process, involves a child in one of the worst forms of child labour, the regulations require the court to take this into account as an aggravating factor when fixing sentence.

The regulations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act focus on children who are old enough to be legally employed. They prohibit these children from undertaking work in dangerous circumstances unless specific precautions are taken to reduce the risk to the child.

Over and above these specific provisions, the regulations require all employers of children to undertake a risk assessment of the workplace and put in place measures to make it safe for child workers. Employers are directed to recognise that children are not only more vulnerable because of physical factors, but are also less able to foresee and avoid danger.

The draft regulations appear in full on www.child-labour.org.za in the 'Documents and laws' section under 'South Africa'.

Enter www.child-labour.org.za

Take a look. Seeing is believing. There is now a website for the CLPA and child labour initiatives in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland, supported by the programme Towards the Elimination of the worst forms of Child Labour (TECL) - and THIS is it: www.child-labour.org.za.

The main challenge was how to create a sustainable website when TECL itself has a limited lifespan. This was resolved by using open source software that would avoid eternal licensing fees and make updating of the site simple. We tried to create the kind of website that stakeholders in the region said they wanted. But using particular software required some trade-offs in terms of both design and functionality. Still, it has yielded a very workable solution.

You’ll find information on international instruments and national legislation, national surveys and focused studies, large programmes and local projects. In most cases, you will find a short summary linking to the full document.

We urge you to:

Use www.child-labour.org.za: It’s a ready reference on child labour, a source of information on upcoming events, a way to ensure you receive newsletters and programme updates and a forum for discussion.
Tell others about www.child-labour.org.za: Send the website “advert” that forms part of this e-mail to your colleagues.
Make www.child-labour.org.za your homepage: This is worthwhile if you use the site very often. See instructions on the site. News get updated weekly.
Link to www.child-labour.org.za: If your organisation has a website, please link it to the new site.
Build www.child-labour.org.za: The site needs enriching. As a first step please fill in the form sent with this newsletter to help populate the Resources section of the website.

Getting the CLPA into shape for next five years

The Child Labour Programme of Action in South Africa is almost five years old and its “guardians” – members of the Implementing Committee – have been getting it into shape for the next stage of life.

The CLPA, which has served since 2003 as the national “roadmap” on child labour, has been quite extensively revised to guide interventions for the second phase of implementation, during the period 2008 to 2013. The revision also fulfilled a request made by Cabinet in 2005 to update the programme to take account of developments since its adoption.

There have been some significant developments in this period:

There is new information on the extent and nature of children’s work activities as a result of the March 2006 Labour Force Survey.
There is also better information on some of the worst forms of child labour because of the qualitative research commissioned during the first phase of the CLPA.
Some legislation that is absolutely essential to success in tackling child labour has been drafted and/or passed by Parliament.
Relevant national programmes have unfolded to an extent where their impact is clearer and the departments concerned can see how to adjust some of them for increased effectiveness.
There is also a better understanding of particular interventions that can help prevent some of the worst forms of child labour, assist the victims to escape from exploitation and help them adjust to a new life.

The CLPA-2 has taken account of these advances. Like the CLPA for the first phase of implementation, the second phase document consists of a set of specific action steps and a lead agency is named for every action step. In most cases the lead agency is a government department and usually the action steps fall within the existing mandate of these departments.

The new CLPA also contains a set of indicators against which to measure progress.

The process for planning the second phase of implementation of the CLPA commenced with gathering information on all relevant developments that had taken place in relation to child labour since 2003. A consultant considered how these impacted on the original CLPA and produced various drafts. These were considered by the Implementing Committee over a six-month period and eventually a comprehensive draft of the CLPA 2008 – 2013 was ready for comment and was circulated to stakeholders. It is due for final consideration by the Implementation Committee in late September.

Access the CLPA 2008 – 2013 on www.child-labour.org.za in the South African section under 'National plan on child labour'

Focus shifts from talking to writing

It’s crunch time in Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland: Writers are preparing the first drafts of national action plans on the elimination of child labour.

The challenge in each case is to develop a clear national plan – but at the same time to incorporate the views expressed and insights shared during the consultation process.

A discussion document was prepared to provide a focus for consultation in each of the countries. In Botswana consultation involved government officials, communities and groups of children. In Namibia and Lesotho there was a dual focus, on officials and children. Swaziland took a slightly different approach, involving officials and traditional leaders.

The draft Botswana Action Plan on the Elimination of Child Labour is expected to be the first to be published for comment, during September. The other three will all be out soon after this.

The draft action plans will be circulated in printed format as well as placed on the child labour website. Stakeholders can comment on the various plans through the Child Labour Forum on the website. Participants can also react to each other’s comments in an interactive process.

Read summaries of the plans on www.child-labour.org.za. Go to BLNS section, click relevant country and see National plan on child labour, sub-category 'Process'.
Comment on plans by clicking on choosing the Forum option under your country, and follow the directions.

Uncovering the hazards in agricultural work

One Sunday in August a 13-year-old boy from Phela in the North West province was sent to tend the family’s cattle. As he was cycling to work, he was attacked and badly mutilated. He survived but will be disfigured for life.

This is an extreme example of the fact that work that may appear suitable for children may expose them to harm. Less startling evidence also emerged from a study on children in agriculture recently undertaken for TECL by the Human Sciences Research Council.

The study covered three sites where child labour was known to prevail:

A commercial wine-producing area of the Western Cape Boland.
The Msinga/Weenen area in KwaZulu-Natal, where commercial and subsistence farming takes place.
Nkomazi municipality, Mpumalanga, where there is subsistence and commercial agriculture, the latter occurring on private and community-owned farms.

In Msinga/Weenen 90% of children 12 to 16 years were found to be working in agriculture.

Overall, 50% of children aged 12 to 16 years who were interviewed in this study were involved in agricultural work, in either commercial or subsistence farming or both. In the Msinga/Weenen area the proportion rose to 90%.

Child work in agriculture is driven by poverty – by the need to boost production on the family land or to earn money by working for other farmers.

In both subsistence and commercial agriculture children faced adverse conditions. Typically they worked even when it was extremely hot and many complained they often were thirsty and tired at work. They often began work before sunrise, finished after sunset and worked very long hours. Huge pressure of work was experienced in the planting and harvesting seasons.

Although most children did farm work outside school hours, a substantial proportion reported the work had a negative impact on schooling. In the 12-14 year age group, this ranged from 21% on community-owned commercial farms to 37% on privately owned commercial farms. Adverse health effects were reported by 85% of these children working on community-owned commercial farms, by 62% on privately owned commercial farms and by 46% in subsistence farming.

The fear factor distinguished children working in subsistence farming from those hired to commercial farmers. The latter group lived in fear of physical and verbal abuse both from fellow workers and the employer.

Children who worked in agriculture experienced anxiety and depression more often than children who did not – and those who worked on commercial farms or did a mixture of commercial and subsistence work experienced the highest levels of anxiety and depression.

The full report will be published in September 2007. An extensive media briefing document can be found on www.child-labour.org.za under Newsroom, sub-category 'Media releases'.

Hard labour, sweet success

Sheer compassion is the foundation of the community organisations involved in the TECL pilot project on commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). But the results that the services are beginning to show prove that it is not a question of all heart and no head.

Removing children from brothels and setting them successfully on a new path is no easy task – for the children and the service providers. But two tiny organisations in Johannesburg’s inner city area are chalking up success:

Berea Home of Hope has trained 40 former CSEC victims as call centre operators, cashiers and waitresses and has placed most of them in jobs. The organisation has helped some of these young women establish communal homes and keeps contact with them through regular support group meetings.
New Life Centre has succeeded in enrolling 34 children at risk and victims of CSEC in a range of community schools. Until this breakthrough, the only option for these children was the New Nation School run by the Gauteng Department of Education specially for children living on the street. By mid-year the children were still all in school and persevering with their studies.

For Berea Home of Hope founder Khanyisile Mota one of the most valuable aspects of the pilot project was interacting with others in the field to explore their method of working. She had had not realised that the “common sense” solutions they devised were in fact well-founded, systematic and effective – and worth passing on to others.

The production of this newsletter was partly funded by the Unites States Department of Labour, under cooperative agreement number E-9-K-3-0005. This document does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of governments of the countries where TECL operates, or of the US government, nor does mention of organizations or not imply endorsement by any of these governments.

Sections

Document Actions