COUNTERING CHILD LABOR AS PART OF THE LIBERATION STRUGGLES IN AFRICA

By

Jacob Waiswa
Peace and Conflict Center
P.O. Box 7062, Kampala-Uganda
jwaiswa@arts.mak.ac.ug

Entry into child protection, advocacy and development services began in 2008 as a result of the vivid experiences of child abuse and neglect children are going through –most especially those coming from broken families. As a result, consultancies and organizations must be developed to handle critical challenges at household and family level.

That is; the conflict between having children and cost of caring for them, communalism verses individual basis for survival, and wind of democratization and human rights in Africa verses traditional dictatorial leadership arrangement –where children and women are last on the social ladder.

Child labor in Uganda emerges as commonest form of child abuse common in impoverished families, marginalized communities, and broken families. It is a means to displace violence that originally was between parents to abused children that now becomes violence afflicted on children by the parent or guardian under whose care they live.

It is understood that because children are the leaders of tomorrow, once wronged, they will go on to destroy ecology and other life-supporting systems in the forms of aggressive behavior that cause injury against self and others, and generally replaying past abuses in the future.

It is thus important that prevention against child abuse and justice for the abused and neglected children is made key to elimination of violence in communities of any form –which may be psychological or physical violence. Such stagnated children healthy development –mentally and physically as hardly will they finish education or perform well at school.

The African traditions view children as a solution to labor inadequacy capable of increasing production and easing burden of parents of elders to perform heavy or light work. For children as young as 3 years, some light tasks are prescribed to increase sociability with other children performing other work tailored to their age.

But with industrialization the trend has drastically changed –which compels parents and community at large to commercialize any form of labor including child labor. And because children are generally perceived beings and hard to suspect of any crime, they are so often picked on by crime and war lords to facilitate their adventures.
Children thus fall victims of not only get killed, defilement, or rape in the cause of gun-battles but suffer from psychological trauma. Their health development is stalled until interventions are done to rescue them.

Poor livelihood situation and death of parents are other compulsive situations that force children to pick up adult responsibilities to contribute to the welfare of their families or care for the little siblings. This is worsened by some communities opting to sell their children across boarders to work as sex slaves, to join child prostitution, or subject them to street begging kind of ‘occupation.’ For Uganda’s case no is showed for such children. Instead, they are socially neglected as ‘people designed to live life that way.’

Any organization coming through to rescue those children ought to coordinate child rights projects services across different sectors of development with emphasis put on elimination of child labor which is a scarce entity in child rights advocacy and protection work.

Instead much more attention is put on domestic violence, abuse and neglect of children than details of child labor. Yet child labor potentially interferes with children education, better career aspirations, and physical and mental health development. Generally, guardianship of children in Uganda is left to who-it-may-concern. It is such a gap that any project should attempt to fill.

They must aim at liberating children from the effects of globalization that warrantees parents to front their children to face the burden of looking for survival means –either through child-slavery, child prostitution, child-soldiering or begging on streets, and the commonest act of overloading them with excess weight to carry like water containers, quarrying and to work as domestic servants.