Children fight for rights

2004-06-11 08:31

Dakar - Children from 18 African countries are co-operating in a Movement of Working Children and Youth (AMWCY) to learn how to defend their rights as child labourers and resolve problems, they said this week.

The movement first took shape in 1994 with help from Enda-Children and Youth in Action, a part of an international non-governmental organisation based in Senegal's capital Dakar.

Its members include "domestic employees, shoe shiners, hod carriers, street traders, apprentice tailors, apprentice hairdressers, land workers... all children and labourers," Awa Ndiaye, the AMWCY's 17-year-old Senegalese delegate told reporters ahead of World Day against Child Labour.

In the west African country, the youths are active in eight towns.

"We've opened 62 classes to teach people to read and write with 6 936 learners in our districts and villages," she said.

The students are also taught to "read French and given the concepts of citizenship and participative democracy," added Ndiaye, a former housemaid turned apprentice seamstress.

Since the movement was founded, "there has been an improvement in conditions" for child labourers," said Pierre Marie Coulibaly, the Senegal co-ordinator of Enda-Children and Youth in Action, which was created in 1985.

Shackled lives?

The Geneva-based World Labour Organisation (WLO) marks this year's World Day against Child Labour on Saturday, the day after it publishes its latest report, Helping Hands or Shackled Lives? Understanding child domestic labour and responses to it.

Coulibaly said: "There has been progress in the way people look (at children), with more consideration, and we also have the ear of the authorities."

However, he added, much remained to be done.

"For example, we must develop preventive actions in villages, spread awareness, get children into school but also improve living standards for the parents," he said.

Details of Enda programmes, including children's schemes in different countries, are available in English and in French at the NGO's web site: www.enda.sn.

- AFP