Govt Admits Failure To Honour Child Conventions

BABOKI KAYAWE
Staff Writer | Monday April 12, 2010 00:00

Labour and Home Affairs Minister, Peter Siele, told a workshop on Friday that some of the conventions were ratified 10 years ago yet nothing has been done to comply with them. He cited the convention that requires the country to draw up a list of hazardous work for children. He said this has not happened because of a shortage of labour officers in the country. Though the Employment Act provides for a penalty of P1,500 or imprisonment for 12 months or both for the employment of children under the age of 15, no one has been punished though child labour is rampant in the country. Siele told the workshop on the hazardous list of work for children in Botswana that child labour is rampant at the household level, but the government can do little because homes are private places that are difficult to access by officers. It is said fighting child labour in farms in areas like Gantsi is difficult to deal with because many children work under the pretext that they are helping their parents.

'It is hard to combat it in this scenario, as their parents lead a nomadic life from one employer to another and they don't have a place called home, this leads to children being used as child labourers both paid and unpaid,' one participant said. Work in agriculture, retail and trading sectors were identified as some of the activities posing hazard to children.

Botswana is a signatory to International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions number C138 and C182, which sets minimum employment age at 15 and prohibits children below 18 from involvement in hazardous work.

Though the ILO seeks to promote a non-hazardous working environment, it does not define what constitutes hazardous work. Hence, there is no clear understanding of the work during the workshop whose purpose was to list hazardous work for children in Botswana as a step towards eliminating child labour.

One of the challenges of drawing a hazardous list is that international and local laws have not been harmonised and the lack of collaboration between various ministries. For instance, the Ministry of Education said on Friday it is not right to set the employment age at 15 when most children in Botswana at that age are going to school. But some countered that in Botswana education is not compulsory and this violates children's rights. This has been found to be a danger in curtailing the government's efforts of building an educated and informed nation as hazardous work for children (child labour) interferes with their education. The 2005-2006 Botswana Labour Force survey indicates that enrolment rates at schools stands at 93.3 percent. However, United Nations representative, Peter Gross, urged government to see to it that the enrolment rate is backed up by proper school attendance, as it does not help having a high enrolment of truant pupils.