According to ILO, Child Labour is well-defined as work that has the potential to deprive children of their childhood, this kind of impact on their dignity and it is also harmful for their growing physical body moral and mental progress and it’s interferes with their education either by not sending them to attend school, giving up school prematurely without giving them primary education and forcing them to combine school attendance with hard work. Now there is another side and that is Child work we will talk about this later but according to ILO its be contingent upon age of the child, type and hours of work performed, working conditions as well as the development stage of individual countries.
Child labours have effects on almost 150 million children worldwide. The sequence of poverty is one of the biggest contributing factors to child labour in today’s world. Children are forced to do work into a dangerous, physically demanding jobs because many poor households use the majority of their income on food and forcing parents to send or sell their children into the workforce in order to make ends meet. Other issues include culture and tradition, market demand, poor enforcement of legislation, and barriers to education.
Today, farming remains one of the most dominant sectors of child labor with accounting for 59 percent of child laborers worldwide. These children have been forced to give up school, sports, play and sometimes even their families and homes to work under dangerous, harmful, unhealthy and abusive conditions. Many children are engaged in paid and unpaid forms of work worldwide to get some money for their families.
Pakistan ranked one of the top ranked country in child labour and it is a sad truth of Pakistan and unfortunately it prevails in many forms in the country. According to a survey directed by the Federal Bureau of Statistics, out of the probable 40 million children in Pakistan, approximately 19 million are working as child labourers.
This is unacceptable given that a principle of policy in Pakistan is to deliver free education and free the country of illiteracy. In many cases, the parents of child labourer do not have enough money to educate their children’s or they believe that education does not lead to marketable skills. And I believe every child in Pakistan, in fact all over the country has a right to be educated, he has the right to enjoy his childhood and play freely!
Not all work done by children should be considered as a child labour that is to be targeted for elimination. Children’s or teenagers’ participation in work that does not affect their health, personal and development or interfere with their schooling is generally observed as being something positive. This includes activities such as helping their parents around the home, supporting in a family business or earning pocket money outside school hours and during school holidays. These kinds of activities contribute to children’s development and to the welfare of their families they provide them with skills and experience, and help to prepare them to be productive members of society during their adult life.
