Over 12 percent of Yemeni children aged between 6 and 14 work. Only 56 percent of working boys and 16 percent of working girls are enrolled in school. What are the main challenges for intervention strategy programmes aimed at educating working children in Yemen?

The Republic of Yemen has high population growth and very high levels of poverty, especially in rural areas. Many families rely on their children’s work for crucial income and often for survival. Children work in a wide range of occupations, ranging from domestic labour to street vending and as guards on farms. Despite recent progress, Yemen has a low female participation rates in primary schooling, particularly in the rural areas, and faces significant challenges in including working children in formal schooling.

The International Labour Organization’s International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) worked in Yemen within mainstream schools as part of its effort to reduce the number of working children. This case study looks at the main challenges of educating working children in Yemen and the issues facing an intervention that uses public schooling as a strategy to prevent child labour.

The study makes the following findings:

• The quality of learning in Yemen is undermined by a pattern of teachers treating all students the same and dominating the delivery of content in classrooms. This is unlikely to cater to the specific needs of working children.   
• The social separation of school and life outside school is a challenge to the agenda of using schooling to prevent children from working. 
• The Government acknowledges that teachers’ understandings and practices need to be substantially re-orientated, but it is difficult to turn teacher training into improved teaching practices in the classroom.
• Teacher education that focuses purely on improving teachers’ skills and competence overlooks their social situation – which is critical to their roles in Yemen’s social development in general, and to working children in particular.
• Taken together, these findings suggest that the education system cannot easily take into account messages about schoolings’ role as a means of preventing children from working. 

Poverty is likely to remain a predominant aspect of Yemeni life and will continue to affect families’ decision-making on their children’s schooling and work. Primary schooling needs to be expanded and made more learner-centred. It should also be differentiated in order to support working children’s enrolment, retention and achievement.

• If primary schooling is used as a strategy to prevent children from working, agencies need to consider the fit between the aims of an intervention and the capacity of the schools to put it into practice.
• Locally-commissioned studies into the nature of child labour in Yemen are needed so that the implications of the various types of children’s work for education can be identified, rather than treated as one entity with a single educational response.
• IPEC’s training approach tends to focus on content. IPEC would benefit from implementing the principles of educational inclusion, as this is a matter of how – and not what – children are taught.
• IPEC needs to challenge its own initiative more explicitly within national education systems reform. It needs to consider in detail the forms and processes of teacher development that are best for promoting inclusion and participation.

Source(s):
‘Working Children and Educational Inclusion in Yemen,’ International Journal of Educational Development 27 (5), pages 512-524, by Caroline Dyer, 2007

id21 Research Highlight: 29 June 2008

Further Information:
Caroline Dyer
School of Politics and International Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
UK

Tel: +44 113 3434402
Fax: +44 113 3434400
Contact the contributor: c.dyer@leeds.ac.uk

School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK

Other related links:
'Are global goals getting girls into school?'

'Earning a life: working children in Zimbabwe'

'Education for all by 2015: the good news'