Call to update Malawi child labour laws
01/07/2008
Malawi has been urged to update its child registration procedures in order to clamp down on the growing problem of underage labour
The country's colonial era 1904 Birth and Deaths Act encompasses no provision for recording new births, which makes identifying the age of workers and tracking vulnerable youngsters virtually impossible.
"Malawian children have no document to show when they were born," a senior official in the president's national registration recently told local media. "We can hardly tell who is a child."
The upshot of this is that while Malawi remains a signatory of numerous conventions against child labour - including the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of a Child - social welfare officers have little authority to take youngsters into care.
Humanitarian news agency IRIN/PlusNews reports that the National Registration Bill was presented to parliament in 2006, but it blamed "political wrangling" for ongoing delays in passing the legislation.
The controversy revolves around the arrest of Malawi's former president, Bakili Muluzi, for allegedly planning a coup against president Bingu wa Mutharika.
But in an underdeveloped country such as Malawi - where the average citizen lives on less than 50 cents a day - humanitarian agencies say the need to tackle child labour has never been greater.
Bright Cakambau of the Youth and Children's Rights Shield commented: "If we could get every child registered at birth, with a birth certificate, then we would have concrete evidence to take to the courts."
Otherwise, he concluded: "It is difficult to say what age a juvenile in his mid-teenage years is without proof."
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