The efforts by the Kenyan government to water down the presence of child labour has been seriously undermined by the Covid-19 pandemic. In what may signify how deep the pandemic’s impact has run, the International Labour Organization (ILO) believes government initiatives, such as mandatory basic education and sanctions for child labor, may be undermined if more families let their children to work to earn a living.
In the current economic landscape where Covid-19 has had a considerable contribution to the closure of schools and intensifying economic shocks within the East African region, the pandemic has led parents to submit their children to the worst forms of child labour.
Covid-19 has further exacerbated the intensity of child labour by causing children to work longer hours and/or under worsening conditions as a result of income and job losses among vulnerable families during the pandemic.
Families whose breadwinners lost their jobs have seen their children stay at home for the lack of school fees. In addition, schools in Kenya were also closed for a year as the country struggled to find a policy that was safe enough to facilitate teaching and learning without causing any health crisis.
Mr Wellington Chibebe, the Director for the International Labour Organization, East Africa, spoke on Saturday that the pandemic threatens to hold back gains made in bringing an end to child labour by 2025. The Director during a High Level Policy Makers Virtual meeting on ending child labour sounded the importance of acting now to ensure an end to child labour so as to keep children in school and not hazardous work.
In the words of the Director, “we must act now to end child labour and keep children in school and not in hazardous work”.
According to the figures provided by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF, the number of Kenyan children entrapped in the claws of child labour stood at 1.3 million, with the majority of these children entrapped in the agricultural sector.
“Children work because their survival depends on it, because their parents do not have access to decent work, because national and social protection systems are weak and because adults take advantage of their vulnerability”, Mr. Chibebe noted.
Jacquelin Mugo, the executive director of the Federation of Kenya Employers echoed the need for cooperation in tackling child labour in Kenya. In her statement, Ms. Mugo expressed that, “If we all work together… if there is concerted will, then we can end child labour”.
Ms. Mugo went on to express the Federation of Kenya Employers’ commitment to weeding out child labour by outlining the organization’s initiatives tailored to addressing child labour, which included the adopt-a-school initiative, empowering households, supporting enterprises’ recovery so as to promote the creation of job opportunities and finally a clear strategy on information sharing.
