South Africa gears up effort to help one million child labourers

South Africa has set itself tough targets for reducing child labour within the next five years. Zolisa Sigabi, spokesperson for the Department said this was according to the draft Child Labour Programme of Action (CLPA) for 2008-2012 released today in Pretoria as a forerunner to the World Day against Child Labour on Wednesday and celebrated each year on 12 June.

“There is acceptable work for children, and then there is child labour. Child labour refers to work that is exploitative, hazardous or inappropriate to the age of the child and which is detrimental to their safety, poses a risk to their health, social, physical, spiritual or mental development and affects their schooling,” said Sigabi. 

In March 2006, the Labour Force Survey established that about 847 000 children between the ages of 10 and 17 years were involved in child labour. This included children under the age of 10 whose work activities qualify as child labour, children living and working on the streets, children in hidden and highly exploitative forms of child labour, such as commercial sexual exploitation or use in the commission of crime, children who have migrated without documents and are also performing hidden work.

Sigabi said with all these categories taken into account, the best estimate is that child labour affects at least one million children in South Africa.

In the next five years, the CLPA aims to: reduce by 80 percent the number of children whose schooling is adversely affected by the work that they are required to do, reduce by 90 percent the number of children performing hazardous work, reduce by 80 percent the number of children living more than five minutes’ walk from the source of their drinking water, in order to reduce excessive work related to fetching water.

In the next two days a number of events will highlight the plight of children in South Africa. Tomorrow the Department of Labour will host an implementations Committee meeting that will evaluate the progress towards achieving the targets that government set.  Parliament will also host a huge contingent of children  through the office on the Rights of the Child  located in the Presidency that emphasises the centrality of the plight of  children in the programmes of government.