Rising poverty forces more Ivory Coast children to work

Soaring poverty levels are triggering an increase in exploitative child labour, on the Ivory Coast, says a new report by aid organisations. About a quarter of children in the west African nation work and eight out of 10 of them are exploited, the government said.  Many are forced into dangerous roles such as sex work, cutting down trees, burning fields, climbing trees to collect palm oil, carrying heavy loads, working as unpaid domestics or market sellers far away from their families.

The number of people living on less than 77p a day has risen from 10 per cent in 1985, to 49 percent in 2008, according to the World Bank. And with its worsening economic situation, more of the nation’s children will end up working, the UK aid organisation, Save the Children, and United Nations Children’s fund (UNICEF) said in their joint report out yesterday.Most children whose only way of survival is selling sex in Abidjan told local aid workers that their relatives or family friends had taken them to the capital. Like many West African countries, in the Ivory Coast, it is normal for families to send their children to live with relatives in towns and cities so they can go to school or find work.  But now, with poverty rising many are more likely to be exploited.

In the country’s major cocoa-planting area children have traditionally helped their families partly as a means of learning how to farm, says Save the Children. But with cocoa prices still relatively low, farmers need to produce more to survive and are forced into making children to work longer hours, the report says.UNICEF and Save the Children recently ran a study into the country’s child protection network. It found that some existing government services, such as the accelerated learning programme for those whose schooling was interrupted by conflict, could be stretched out to working children. Creating a wider child protection system would mean improving practical services – such as medical help and care centres – economic support, for example micro-credit loans to farmers, said Save the Children.

Meanwhile fees for healthcare in he country are holding up the fight against child malnutrition in the west, health officials and aid workers said today (Tuesday). Malnutrition in the west and north are on average at 3.6 per cent and 5.4 per cent respectively; while chronic malnutrition is above 40 percent in both regions, according to preliminary results of a 2009 nutrition study done by the Health Ministry, quoted by the United Nations news service, IRIN.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children