D. Michailidou: Our responsibility to ensure that all children grow up having all the opportunities they are entitled to

“Child labor is a wound in the body of society that must be closed. No child deserves to lose his childhood. It is our responsibility to ensure that all children grow up as children and have the opportunities they deserve.”

This was stated by the Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, in charge of Welfare and Social Solidarity, Domna Michailidou, speaking to the Athenian-Macedonian News Agency, on the occasion of the International Day against Child Labor.

“According to figures released by the International Labor Organization, 152 million children worldwide, or one in ten children worldwide, are forced to work at best to help the family budget many times over. however, as victims of coercion and exploitation.

They are children who did not go to school or dropped out, but also children who are forced to combine education with work, working in the afternoon, after school, on weekends or on vacation. Poverty is the main reservoir of child labor. It is the cause that drives children to work and, consequently, to exploitation.

Proof of the fact that the children who are forced to work come from financially weaker families, with a low level of education. For all these children, childhood is not synonymous with carelessness, play and carefree school years.

On the contrary, it often happens that children work under adverse conditions and in a state of exploitation, doomed to experience daily physical and mental misery. But it is not only the loss of childhood! “Notes Ms. Michailidou and points out that dropping out of school prescribes to a maximum degree the quality of adult life.

According to the Deputy Minister of Labor, working children are often trapped in the vicious circle of poverty, because the lack of even basic education deprives them of the necessary knowledge and to cultivate skills that will give them access to good and well paid jobs.

The aim is to fight poverty and alleviate inequalities

According to Ms. Michailidou, in the face of this reality, the antidote is the fight against poverty and the alleviation of inequalities.

“As a state, we owe all these children the opportunities they are entitled to, to get out of the cycle of poverty, to regain their childhood and to create the conditions for a dignified adult life, according to their own wishes,” said the Deputy Minister of Labor and adds that the fight against and the gradual elimination of child poverty is the goal of the “Child Guarantee” program, which our country was the first to incorporate into its national law. As he explains, this is a European program which aims to reduce the number of children in Europe living or at risk of poverty by 5 million by 2030.

The main pillars of the national policy for the child

Speaking to ΑΠΕ-ΜΠΕ, Ms. Michailidou underlines that, for this purpose, the Member States must design actions that create the conditions for every child, regardless of race, origin, religion or language, that will ensure easy free access of the most vulnerable children in pre-school education, education, health services, healthy nutrition and adequate and decent housing.

“These are goals that are fully in line with our national child policy. For the benefit of the most vulnerable children in particular, we are upgrading the operation of daycare centers and ensuring access to pre-school education, linking child benefit to families’ obligation to send children to school, we have included in the program “school meals” an additional 268 primary schools located in geographical areas with low incomes.

At the same time, we are strengthening our support to vulnerable households both through permanent and extraordinary increases in welfare benefits, as well as through active policies aimed at social inclusion and the labor market, “said the Deputy Minister of Labor.

Source: AMPE