Poverty hampers effort to stop child labor

Poverty hampers effort to stop child labor

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Severe economic hardship and political instability have
undermined efforts to eradicate child labor in the country,
Minister of Manpower and Transmigration Jacob Nuwa Wea said on
Monday.

"Child labor is closely linked to the poverty beleaguering
families, poor health and lack of education opportunities for
Indonesian children," Nuwa Wea said on Monday when unveiling an
International Labor Organization (ILO) report titled A Future
Without Child Labor in Jakarta.

The economic crisis, which has plagued the country since 1997,
has effectively reduced people's purchasing power, increasing the
number of people living under the poverty line to around 40
million people, or roughly 20 percent of the country's 215
million population.

This has also forced poor families to send underaged children
to work. According to the latest data issued by the Central
Bureau of Statistics (BPS), at least 2.3 million Indonesian
children aged between 10 and 14, and 3.8 million children aged
between five and 18 work to support their families.

"The figure might not be correct because it is extremely
difficult to obtain an accurate figure on the number of child
labor in Indonesia," said ILO Jakarta director Alan Boulton
without elaborating.

Nuwa Wea appealed to all social components to join hands in
fighting against child labor, saying it was impossible for the
government to do it alone.

Indonesia has ratified ILO Convention No. 138 and incorporated
it into Law No. 20/1999, which bans, among other things, the
employment of children under 15 years old.

The Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration is working on a
bill on the training and protection of workers, which includes
banning employing underaged children.

Worldwide, the report said that some 352 million children aged
between five and 17 years old were involved in various forms of
economic activities, of which 179 million children were involved
in employment that did not only harm them physically and
psychologically but also threatened their lives.

Geographically, the Asia-Pacific region has the highest number
of child workers, with 120 million children employed, sub-Sahara
Africa second with 48 million, followed by South America and the
Caribbean with 17.4 million, and the Middle East and North Africa
with 13.4 million.

The report also revealed that child labor was not confined to
developing or poor countries. The report showed that
approximately 2.5 million of the world's child laborers were in
industrialized countries, while another 2.4 million were found in
newly independent countries.