Plan International Egypt, an NGO working to promote children's rights, organised a conference in Cairo recently to present its work to eliminate child labour in the country and protect the rights of working children. Legislative protection should be expanded to protect child workers in the countryside, it said, as well as in domestic environments. Child workers should be given full social protection, and there should be mechanisms allowing NGOs and other bodies to monitor the issue. Child workers should be carefully listened to and their views taken into account in any future legislation. The participants at the conference also called for education to be improved in Egypt in order to reduce dropout rates, one of the main reasons behind the spread of child labour. Mohamed Tageddin is the child labour and street children programme co-ordinator at Plan Egypt. He said that the NGO is working to help child workers access their rights. “The first phase of the programme was an assessment, allowing us to find out the circumstances that push child labourers into work,” he said. “We focused on the Basateen, Ezbet Kheir Allah and Al-Margue districts of Cairo, and this allowed us to identify areas where we could help. “The idea is to understand the types of problems such children face and design possible solutions. The assessment also allowed us to gather valuable statistics,” Tageddin said. Among the statistics is the number of children in the areas who dropped out of school in order to work. The project has been running for two years and has created 10 associations concerned with child labour in the districts studied, along with four vocational training centres. Twenty-five volunteers have been trained to deal with child labour issues. Reda, 33, the mother of three children, explains what she took away from Plan Egypt training sessions. “My eldest son used to work in a carpenter's workshop, but I wanted to send him to school. I went to the classes a few years ago and learned that Plan Egypt was teaching women and girls skills like sewing and hairdressing. I joined the classes and later got a job as a hairdresser. With the money I earned, I was able to send my son to school,” she said. Her son, Mohamed, 19, said, “When I was 12 years old I used to work in a carpenter's workshop from 7 am to 12 or 1 pm daily. They used to make me do a lot of work and I would be exhausted at the end of the day. I did not like it, but there was no one to support the family. “My mother saw that I was tired of working and decided to work instead, allowing me to go to school. Moreover, the Plan Egypt sessions I attended helped me in my later work, notably on safety issues.” Today, Mohamed plans to give up work in order to go to university. “There are a lot of needy people in our village, so I believe that the best solution for the problem of child labour would be for the government to find jobs for the parents so that they did not need to send their children out to work. It should also give pensions to people not able to work,” Mohamed said. According to Tageddin, helping working children is a multi-factorial task. “We work on all aspects of child labour, starting with the child, then the family, and then the society as a whole. We have set up youth clubs for working children, which allow them to find ways to spend their leisure time as well as complete their studies. “The clubs help to rehabilitate the children, with a view to introducing them back into a school environment. We also ask the families to join in the activities, and help to raise their awareness of the dangers of child labour.” The NGO also tries to resolve the financial problems that lie behind families sending their children out to work. Older members of the family can be provided with job opportunities through training, for example. “What we do is to turn the tables: instead of parents sending their children out to work, we try to help parents find jobs that can support their children and help send them back to school,” said Tageddin. “If this is not possible, the children can be sent to community schools under the supervision of the ministry of education, all helping these children back into school and out of work. “We provide micro-loans to families, for example, and by using the gameyat saving system we help to improve the financial situation of the families concerned. We are also working on raising people's awareness of the importance of abolishing child labour,” Tageddin said. The NGO works closely with institutions like the National Council for Women and Children and the Ministry of Social Solidarity, notably with regard to training and awareness-raising schemes. “The laws governing child labour are rarely applied, and we are working to help ensure that they are,” Tageddin said. “It is important that those concerned make sure that the laws are carried out.” Tageddin lists some of the problems that need to be tackled when combating child labour. “There is not much awareness about the problem of child labour in Egypt. Financial hardships are the main cause, and we try our best to solve such problems even if sometimes it is difficult to get business owners onboard,” he said. “There is also the problem of children taken out of such environments and sent to school later going back to work. We have tried to remedy this by hiring experts to monitor the children and make sure they do not go back to work or drop out again. Building a good relationship with the families is key. “We have been able to help 800 children go back to school in our target districts, and we have also helped 1,000 children by improving their work places. Forty-five per cent of the 800 children come from families in southern Cairo, and here the idea has been to help these families find work such that the children can concentrate on their education.” In future, the project will be expanded, Tageddin said. “We are already starting a situational analysis in Assiut to help us assess the needs of the place and its people. Through discussion with local officials we have been able to determine places most plagued by the problem of child labour.” For its part, the government has tried to tackle the problem using various methods. In 2009, the Ministry of Manpower cracked down on industries employing children and Egypt signed an agreement with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to abolish the problem. In the same year, the governorate of Minya started a crackdown on children working in mines and vowed to punish mine owners employing them. In 2010, an Egyptian delegation participated in the International Labour Conference in Geneva and put forward new solutions to tackle the problem. In 2013, the ministry issued further warnings to factories employing children. A further crackdown in 2014 led to 254 warnings. According to Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) statistics, in 2009 the rate of working children aged six to 17 was 29 per every 1,000, increasing to 66 in every thousand in the age group 14 to 17. Far more boys worked than girls. In 2011, there were some one million children aged five to 17 working in harsh conditions in Egypt. The highest percentage was in the 15 to 17 age group, with far more boys working than girls. The figures were similar for children working in rural areas in the Delta and in Upper Egypt. Some 120,000 children had never been to school, the statistics said, and there were some 487,000 drop-outs, 79 per cent of them boys. In 2011, 62 per cent of all working children were engaged in agriculture; in 2012, this figure had increased to 83.8 per cent. Of these, 46.2 per cent were aged 15 to 17, and 78.8 per cent of them were boys and 21.2 per cent girls. According to research conducted by Plan Egypt, the main causes of child labour are the poor economic conditions of the families concerned, along with customs or traditions that encourage children to work. Some industries or crafts depend on child workers, and 48 per cent of the working children surveyed did not want to attend school. According to the Plan Egypt figures, 10.7 per cent of children had dropped out of school because they were treated badly by their teachers, 20 per cent of them because they constantly failed, and 23.3 per cent because their families could not afford to send them to school. The figures said that 1.6 per cent of working children could not stop working under any circumstances, while 4.2 per cent would stop working if they were girls and were about to get married; 29.7 per cent said they would stop working if they did better in school; and 97 per cent said they would do so if there was a source of income that could support their families. “There is a problem of negligence in some schools,” said mother-of three Reda. “Some teachers force students to join extra classes and pay high fees, even though many families cannot afford them. Schools should be better monitored to ensure that children do not drop out of schools for such reasons.” According to Tageddin, “The problem of child labour needs the co-operation of all the parties concerned, as well as proper assessment so that solutions can be developed. In the end, the community needs to be in charge, though we need to support it and to carry out further projects. People should become more aware of the extent of the problem, and they should understand the need for a national framework that will allow targets to be reached.
