RI, ILO to tackle worst forms of child labor
Leony Aurora, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The International Labor Organization (ILO) will launch on Thursday a support program to assist the first phase of Indonesia's national plan of action to tackle the worst forms of child labor.
Immediate targets of this program will be children involved in drug trafficking, prostitution, offshore fishing, mining and the footwear sector, director for operations of ILO's International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO-IPEC), Guy Thijs, said on Wednesday.
"We will link child labor eradication with other development efforts, including education and poverty alleviation," he said.
The chief technical adviser of the ILO Jakarta office, Patrick Quinn, said the support program would last for four years, with some US$4 million of funds involved to finance, among other activities, public awareness enhancement, advocacy, capacity building and promotion of labor concerns in national and local policies.
The ILO has estimated that some four million children below the age of 18 in the country are involved in employment deemed to be dangerous. There is no official data on the number of child laborers here.
Indonesia is the first Asian country to ratify ILO Convention 182, which requires the eradication of 20 of the worst forms of child labor within 20 years. A national action committee was set up in 2001 and a 20-year national plan was established under Presidential Decree No. 59/2002.
Its main focus for the first five years is increasing public awareness, problem mapping and the establishment of concrete programs for the eradication of child labor.
"The administrations, central and provincial, hold the central role. We will only be the catalyst," said Thijs. Provincial committees are expected to be set up soon.
Pilot projects have been conducted since December 1999 to demonstrate that work without child labor is possible. The projects, to end in July, involve children working on fishing platforms in North Sumatra and children in the footwear industry in Cibaduyut, Bandung.
"When we started, there were 1,100 children working in Cibaduyut. Our latest survey in February showed that there were only 58," said Anna Engblom of the ILO, who is in charge of the projects.
Awareness raising and collaboration with all stakeholders, including local administrations, non-governmental organizations, local communities and the children's parents, contributed much to the Cibaduyut project's success, she said.
Provincial committees are expected to duplicate such projects, using the models that already have been tried.
In cooperation with a number of universities in the country, the ILO-IPEC has also embarked on a rapid assessment to collect data. They have done surveys to map out children involved in drug trafficking in Jakarta, prostitution across Java, offshore fishing in North Sumatra, the footwear sector in West Java and mining in East Kalimantan.
The assessment of the footwear industry in West Java, for example, has found two areas with a high percentage of child labor, in Ciomas and Tasikmalaya. An estimated 9,000 children are working in these areas.