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.