Does child labour always undermine education?

Children are often forced to work due to chronic poverty. Globally, work is the main occupation of almost 20 percent of all children aged under 15. This is considered a major obstacle to achieving the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of universal primary education by 2015.

Research from the University of Oxford in the UK suggests that child labour is often essential to household survival. Children who do household work release adults from domestic responsibilities to earn a wage; those employed outside the home contribute to family income. Children's roles are often flexible and they can usually find work although their parents may remain unemployed.

The relationship between child work, poverty and schooling is complex. In many contexts, child work does not merely bring in income but is an essential part of children's learning and social integration. Working children sometimes enjoy better nutritional status than those who do not work. They may work in order to pay for schooling: far from being an obstacle to achieving universal primary education, child work often enables children to attend school. Undoubtedly, long working days undermine school attendance and performance but educational problems are frequently the major cause of child work rather than the consequence. Research from countries such as Ethiopia, Bolivia and India reveals that a number of children enter work because they are frustrated with irrelevant curricula or poor quality teaching, for example, rather than from economic necessity.

Abolishing child labour has been a main policy objective in the past but such generic policies will not help achieve the MDGs. Interventions need to respond directly to the specific circumstances of children. It is also important to recognise that:

• Removing children from work may not always serve their best interests, especially in poor communities where families have very limited income options.
• Although the dangers of bonded child labour and trafficking are known, other work situations such as factory or domestic labour can entail risks that are less obvious.
• Children may take up hazardous forms of work as they generate high incomes and bring in other benefits: child 'soldiers' in conflict situations, for example, give money to families and protect them from extortion or armed attack although their own lives could be in danger.
• Employers, children and their families may collude to perpetuate children's work despite the best intentions of policy.
• Improving the quality and relevance of education to working children's lives and increasing their access to it would help in reducing family poverty and hazardous child work n

Jo Boyden
Refugee Studies Centre
Queen Elizabeth House
University of Oxford
21 St. Giles
Oxford OX13LA
UK
T +44 (0)1865 270271
jo.boyden@qeh.ox.ac.uk

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