Preventing Child Labour in Colombia
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Development. Copyright © 2000 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200003) 43:1; 97–100; 011894.
Local/Global Encounters
Preventing Child Labour in Colombia MARÍA CRISTINA SALAZAR
ABSTRACT Defence for Children International (DCI-Colombia) is involved in the area of child labour, a widespread problem in Latin America. María Cristina Salazar describes the efforts to eradicate child labour in onion plantations in the village of Aquitania and in Bogotá’s central market, Corabasto. Aquitania is a rural municipality of 22,000 inhabitants which grows onions, whereas Corabastos is a gigantic corporation which receives 12,000 tons of food daily. A quarter of a million people move around the markets, forming a sort of ‘floating city’. In both Aquitania and Corabastos child labour is rampant; many children less than 12 years old work full- or parttime. KEYWORDS child participation; convention on the rights of the child; displaced people; hunger
The activities of DCI-Colombia In order to eradicate child labour, DCI has combined participatory research techniques with education and mobilization processes. Studies have built up knowledge of labour conditions for the children, of the kinds of work they carry out, their families, their hopes and failures. DCI has looked at what forces children to work at such early ages and what their families think of issues such as childhood, children’s rights and child welfare. The team includes a sociologist, a teacher, a psychologist, a health worker and an ecologist. They are all women, except the sociologist. The psychologist and the ecologist live in Aquitania (about six hours from Bogotá). The projects focus on schools and teacher training. Education in children’s rights has been undertaken in workshops with different groups, including the parents of working children, teachers, officials and the children themselves, with the aim of keeping the children in school. Links with different institutions in each locality have been established in order to understand the problems associated with child labour. After having identified the working children, we organized different groups
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Development 43(1): Local/Global Encounters according to their interests. The children wanted to play, to know more about their communities and about their own growth and development. We worked with them in the fields, in the schools and in the marketplaces. Their parents became interested in these activities and they also started to ask for workshops to further their own knowledge and perceptions of child work, and for support to keep children in the schools. We started to perceive a greater sense of self-esteem both among the working children and their parents.
Participation We followed the principles as set out in UNICEF’s paper on Child Participation (UNICEF, forthcoming) which emphasizes that children’s participation is one of the main principles and facilitating rights of the Convention on the R
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