Prevention, protection and monitoring: Sustaining the impact

Child Labour Monitoring at community, district and provincial levels

There are still 160 million children in child labour in the world today.  This is 1 in 10 children. Most of them are found in agriculture but no sector is spared. The largest share of child labour takes place within families, primarily on family farms or in family microenterprises. However, child labour happens everywhere and in many forms. This means that we can only address the problem if we all take action, from government authorities to parents. And the first step is to identify cases of child labour, by regularly visiting all kinds of places where children could be working.

Child Labour Monitoring (CLM) involves the active scrutiny of workplaces, the referral of identified cases of child labour to existing mechanisms, the protection of children in child labour (through different kinds of actions) and the prevention of new occurrences by sensitization. CLM can be done by all kinds of actors but has proven very effective and sustainable when local communities are actively involved.

In Pakistan, the CLEAR Cotton Project identified children in or at risk of child labour in the cotton value chain and referred them to the appropriate services. This was done in partnership with the NGO Bunyad Literacy Community Council (BLCC). 

42 monitoring committees were created and these committees met on a quarterly basis. The monitoring activities supported the project interventions on education and helped to ensure that all the children who were prevented from or withdrawn from child labour and enrolled in education activities did not fall back into child labour. 

“Our children were either wasting whole days in the streets or working in the cotton fields. Now, no more, as they are studying in Decent Work Cotton Resources Centres and I am here to make sure that they are registered and studying.”

A member of a community-based Child Labour Monitoring and Grievance Committee at Khairpur Tamenwali, Pakistan

Under the Sindh Bonded Labour (Abolition) Act 2015, District Vigilance Committees (DVCs) are a district-level monitoring mechanism for the prevention of forced labour. In Pakistan, the Project supported the Department of Labour Sindh in the issuance of official notifications to activate all 29 District Vigilance Committees in Sindh province through the district administration. The official notifications issued under this law give DVCs the mandate to monitor forced labour and children in forced labour.

In Burkina Faso, over 55 percent of children aged 5 to 17 living in cotton-growing areas are involved in child labour. To change this, the establishment of child labour monitoring mechanisms was also linked to the project activities on education and on vocational training. 20 community-based child labour monitoring committees were set up in collaboration with Faso Action pour le Développement Communautaire (FDC), one in each of the 20 villages where the Accelerated Schooling programme was implemented. 

At the provincial level, three child labour monitoring committees were set up, bringing together representatives of the provincial cotton producers’ unions (UPPC), the Regional Directorates of Labour and Social Protection, as well as representatives of training centres and master craftsmen who receive and train children who have been withdrawn from child labour. In addition to ensuring continuous monitoring of cases of child labour and forced labour in the value chain, these committees accompany the children withdrawn from work after their vocational training activities and professional installation.

In collaboration with the Association No-Bièl and with the National Coordination of Associations of Working Children and Youth in Burkina Faso (CN/AEJTB), 30 community child protection committees and 5 child protection networks were also set up to help address the issue of child labour in the project regions.

Regional consultation and monitoring mechanisms

In the Sikasso and Ségou regions, the project supported the NGO ALPHALOG to enable communities to set up and run 2 consultation and coordination platforms (one in each region) on the issues of child and forced labour.

The platforms contribute to facilitating the implementation of vocational training for children aged 14-17, monitoring children placed in apprenticeship programmes (technical monitoring is carried out by the Regional Directorates of Employment and Vocational Training of Sikasso and Segou), and raising awareness among parents on the dangers of child labour.

In the course of the project implementation, the platform brought together 312 stakeholders through 24 meetings (4 per each of the 6 communes of intervention) that led to the setting up of 6 local multistakeholder mechanisms for monitoring and remedying child labour.