Union warns of rise in child labour
PHOTO | FILE Pupils during a celebration to highlight the need to fight child labour which includes sexual exploitation and human trafficking. A workers’ union wants the government to enforce the law on mandatory education for all children.
What you need to know:
- Parents accused of encouraging minors to work as house helps or sex slaves for tourists
Child activists want the law requiring compulsory education for all children to be strictly enforced even as a lobby raised the alarm over increased cases of child labour in industry and politics.
The Kenya Plantation and Agriculture Workers Union (Kpawu) department of gender, youth and education at the weekend urged the government to prosecute parents offering children as workers.
The union said that children between the age of five and 17 were recruited as domestic workers, sex workers or manual labourers in mines, quarries and in the fishing industry. Some of the children were forced to drop out of school as their meagre wages could not sustain their education.
Kpawu noted that such cases of child abuse were rampant in coastal counties of Kilifi, Lamu and Mombasa where young children were sold to tourists in brothels or made to work at sisal plantations.
“We would like to see the government enforcing the law because there is a growing tendency by some parents or guardians to use children for selfish gains,” said Kpawu secretary Dalphine Muunde at the union’s branch office in Mombasa.
“We are saddened by many children loitering in the streets or working as domestic servants and when you ask them why they are not in school, they tell you they cannot pay for their education,” Ms Muunde added.
She noted that the duties assigned to the children were also too heavy as the minors are made to perform tasks that require adult-energy.
The Kpawu secretary challenged chiefs and other State administrators to ensure that all children were taken to school.
The union’s coordinator, Ms Henrietta Namava, said that of late, children were being used to perpetrate acts of violence by politicians because of the ‘little’ pay they required.
Ms Namava said that the children were lured to form illegal groups to cause chaos during rival candidates’ campaigns.
“The number of children being used in political campaigns has significantly increased. Many of them are being hired for as little as Sh50 to cause chaos at rival campaigns,” said Ms Namava. She appealed to politicians to act stop hiring children.
Last year, the government approved the new Education Bill that warns parents that they risked a jail term of one year or a fine of Sh100,000 if they did not take their children to school.
