Ing. Rijk van Haarlem

Chief Technical Adviser. ILO-IPEC

San José, Costa Rica

A presentation during the symposium

"Child Labor & the Globalizing Economy: Lessons from Asia/Pacific countries"

Stanford University, California

February 7 – 9, 2001

Distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen

I am very honored to be invited to address this important child1 labor symposium organized by the Asia/Pacific Research Center of this renowned university. The organizers requested me to elaborate on the experiences of the ILO in the execution of large child1 labor projects in Asia and especially on the lessons learned during the implementation of those projects. Emphasis hereby should be on the strategies we are using and NOT using in other ILO child1 labor projects, such as the projects in the coffee and commercial agriculture sectors in Central America and the Dominican Republic.

Ladies and gentlemen

The BGMEA/ILO/UNICEF Child Labor Project in the garment industry of Bangladesh, funded by the US Department of Labor, was the first of a series of large child1 labor projects that the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor of the ILO, better known as IPEC, is executing in Asia, Africa and Central America. This project started in 1995 and is based on a Memorandum of Understanding signed by the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers' and Exporters' Association (BGMEA) and two international organizations ILO and UNICEF, with the aim of progressively phasing out child1 labor in the more than 2,500 factories that are member of the association. Phasing out in a way acceptable to the members of the association and in the best interest of the child1 workers.

The key elements of the Memorandum of Understanding were;

a) A fact-finding survey to determine the extent of child1 labor in the garment industry;

b) The establishment of an education program in which identified child1 workers should be enrolled;

c) The establishment of a monitoring and verification system

d) The provision of income compensation in the form of a monthly stipend of Taka 300, the equivalent of, at that time, 7 US dollars. The costs to be shared by on fifty-fifty basis by BGMEA, the ILO and other donors.

e) An awareness raising and publicity campaign to explain and promote the goals of the project.

e) The establishment of an Informal Steering Committee comprising the 3 partners BGMEA, ILO and UNICEF, the Government of Bangladesh represented by the Ministry of Labor and the Embassy of the US in Dhaka.

Therefore, based on the components of the MoU, the project has two main components, which are complementary.

The first component consists of a social rehabilitation program in which we provide (non-formal) education to the (ex)child1 workers and access to micro-credit systems for their families in order to increase their income and make them less dependent on child1 labor.

The second component is a child1 labor monitoring and verification system, which was designed and is managed by ILO-IPEC.

During the survey, which was held in 1995, monitoring teams comprising ILO, UNICEF and BGMEA monitors visited 2,129 factories. In 942 factories they identified a total of 9,546 child1 workers under the age of 14 years. So, at that time the percentage of factories using child1 was around 43%.

Political unrest in the first half of 1996 hampered a smooth implementation of the project, which made a second survey necessary. This survey was conducted by 15 monitoring teams comprising of ILO, BGMEA and Labor Inspectors from the Ministry of Labor. It revealed another 5,647 children in 678 out of 1,922 visited factories. So, despite of the slow start, the percentage of factories using children was considerably lower than in 1995, namely 34% instead of 43%.

Since the last survey, the ILO-IPEC is continuously monitoring the more than 2,500 operating BGMEA member factories on an announced and random basis. The results were very good. From the very beginning we could observe a tremendous decrease in the number of factories who were using child1 labor. The percentage of those factories went down to 4,5% in the year 2000.

The total number of ex-child workers we could enroll in the 336 schools established by UNICEF and the 2 NGO's, during the course of the project was more than 8,300. These children were given non-formal education during three years with the aim of mainstreaming them in the formal education system. However, as soon as a child1 attains 14 it is eligible to work. In order to keep these children in the schools and give them the opportunity to finish their education, UNICEF provided additional funds to continue payments of their stipends, because there was no provision in the MoU to pay the students after they became 14 years of age.

What are the lessons we learned from the implementation of this project? Let's start with the positive ones. This project is considered to be a very successful model of co-operation based upon an agreement to phase out child1 labor in a certain sector between employers, NGO's, the Government and international organizations. It showed that with a combined effort and commitment of all the stakeholders, especially the employers, we really can make a difference.

Within a relatively short period we were able to bring the extent of child1 labor in the Bangladeshi garment industry down from 42,8% to 4,5% of the inspected factories, while at the same time the percentage child1 labor of the total labor force diminished from 3,56% to 0.26%.

ILO-IPEC monitors were trained not to act as policemen of inspectors during their visits to factories and schools, but to advice the factory owners on the benefits of the project and the need to phase out child1 labor in their factories. This approach generated an atmosphere of trust and confidence between the partners to the benefit of the project

However, there are of course also less positive experiences. One of those was the payment of the monthly stipend. A payment meant as a partial compensation for the income-loss of the families of children who were transferred from work in garment factories to the UNICEF schools.

Payment of stipend does not contribute to the sustainability of a project and at the same time constitutes a considerable portion of the budget. Although the amount we pay to each child1 is little (at this moment just above 6 US dollars), we paid a total of more than one million dollars to the (ex) child1 workers during the course of the project.

Since 1997, the ILO-IPEC is implementing other large child1 labor projects in Pakistan, East Asia, Africa and Central America. In all of these projects we are using the same strategies as adopted in the BGMEA project while taking into account the lessons we learned in that project. We combine social protection programs for the ex-child workers and their families which are implemented by local NGO,s with a transparent and reliable monitoring system that is executed by ILO-IPEC. For reasons mentioned earlier we do not pay stipends to the children who are enrolled in the education programs established by the various projects. As an alternative to this type of income compensation we provide vocational training and access to micro-credit systems for the families of the children under the umbrella of the social protection programs. Furthermore, we put an emphasis on awareness raising on the issue of child1 labor and the promotion of co-operation and commitment among the stakeholders.

At this moment, the ILO-IPEC sub-regional office in San José, Costa Rica is implementing a large sub-regional project on child1 labor in the coffee and commercial agricultural sectors in Central America and the Dominican Republic using the experiences from Bangladesh and Pakistan. This USDOL funded project encompasses 7 sub-projects in the coffee sector and 4 in the commercial agricultural sector.

The participating countries in the coffee sector are Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica with 2 projects and the Dominican Republic. In commercial agriculture we have projects in Guatemala (broccoli), Honduras (melon), Nicaragua (basic grains) and the Dominican Republic (tomato). The target group in the coffee sector is 21,500 working children and 4,150 families.

In the commercial agricultural sector we are targeting 10,820 working children and 2,300 families.

In the design phase of the various projects, ILO-IPEC ensured full co-operation of the government (ministries of education, health and labor), local authorities, NGO's, communities and of course last but not least the plantation owners. One thing we learned in the Bangladesh and Pakistani projects is, that co-operation from the employers and having their support for the goals of the project is essential for success and sustainability. Therefore, it is with pleasure that I can inform you that without exemptions, all the associations of coffee growers and plantations owners are aware of the importance to phase out child1 labor in their sectors and are co-operating with the other stakeholders in the execution of the projects.

Each sub-project has the earlier mentioned components, namely social protection and monitoring and verification. The social protection part of the projects, which is implemented by national and international operating NGO's, consists of action programs in the field of education, health services, alternative income generation and awareness raising. The monitoring and verification part is as usual executed by ILO-IPEC.

The first phase of the coffee project will end in June 2002, while the commercial agricultural project will end its first phase in March 2003. In the coffee projects we are starting the education and awareness raising programs, which will shortly be followed by the micro-credit schemes and the actual monitoring visits to plantations families and schools. In commercial agricultural sector we are mounting baseline surveys which will generate the information upon which the NGO´s can design their respective action programs and the ILO-IPEC its monitoring system that for obvious reasons has to be tailor-made to the specifics of the region where is has to be deployed.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I like to conclude my short presentation. I hope that I could give you some information about our experiences in executing child1 labor projects in Asia and what we learned from those experiences to the benefit of projects we are implementing in other parts of the wor ld. Projects designed to phase out the menace of child1 labor in a specific sector. We identified the corner stones of successful child1 labor projects. They are co-operation and commitment of all actors, especially the employers and heads of the families, access to education programs and micro-credit systems, awareness raising and a credible and transparent monitoring system.

I thank you for your kind attention and I am looking forward to fruitful discussions with you.