Coronavirus: Calls on governments to increase cash benefits to end child labor

From brick kilns to carpet weaving, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted children as young as 8 to work in hazardous and abusive work, human rights groups said today, urging governments to make cash available to reduce child labor.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other human rights organizations in Ghana, Nepal, and Uganda interviewed 81 children working in high-risk sectors, including gold mining, fishing, and construction, during pandemic of the young coronavirus.

“What was most shocking about what we found was the exploitation (…) of some children being paid for alcohol in quarries,” said Angela Naboue Kazoule, program director for the Uganda Initiative for Social and Economic Rights, which .

“Because of extreme hunger, some (children) ate the leftovers from fermenting local beer to survive, they needed to put something in their stomach,” she said in an email to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The number of working children worldwide has dropped significantly to 152 million from 246 million in 2000, but the UN fears that job losses and school closures caused by the new coronavirus pandemic will reverse this declining trend.

Ghana, Nepal and Uganda have all made progress in reducing child labor in recent years and are working to eradicate it by 2025 in line with the UN World Development Goals.

But in Ghana and Uganda, children have told researchers they have inhaled harmful dust in mines, carried sacks full of ore, used toxic mercury to extract gold from ore and been injured by falling rocks.

In Nepal, children reported working 14 hours a day in carpet weaving. In all three countries, more than a third of the children who spoke to researchers worked at least 10 hours a day, and more than a quarter said their employers sometimes withheld their salaries.

HRW stressed that benefits have proven to be an effective way to reduce child labor in poor families, but that around 1.3 billion children worldwide, mainly in Africa and Asia, do not have access to such support.

“For many families with children, government assistance in responding to the pandemic was too small to protect their children from dangerous and exploitative jobs,” said Joe Becker, director of the NGO’s child rights group. organization.

“Governments and donors need to increase cash benefits for families to keep children away from abusive and dangerous child labor,” he added.

Kazoule added that providing free school meals to all students in Uganda could also prevent children from dropping out of school and turning to dangerous work.

Solomon Kushi Abofo, program coordinator at Friends of the Nation in Ghana, who also participated in the study, said that despite the study’s findings, he was optimistic because “there is growing awareness of child labor.”

The findings of this study are “a lesson for us to really address socio-economic issues in our country and improve access to health care, education and financial relief,” he said.