At least 3,346 children from six districts around Uganda have been rescued from child labor and returned to school by the International Labour Organisation-ILO. The children were rescued through ILO’s Social Finance Model-A Fight Against Child Labour in Mbale, Buikwe, Sironko, Bulambuli, Kabarole, and Kikuube from October 2021 to date.
The Social Finance Model-A Fight Against Child Labour is part of the ILO Project- for Accelerating Action for the Elimination of Child labor in supply Chains in Africa” (ACCEL Africa). In this model, credit institutions, have to include the child labor elimination aspects in their transactions, and the pilot study focused on Village Savings and Loan Associations, VSLA.
According to a performance report by the Nascent Research and Development Organization- NRDO-U, the implementers of the program in the selected districts, the intervention covered up to 1,626 households in the coffee and tea commercial farming value chains. From this report, 1,620 of the rescued children were male and 1,726 females aged between 5 to 13 years.
The program rescued up to 4,999 children between 5 to 17 years. Barbra Odongo, the NRDO-U programs manager told URN that they are working with the VSLA of ordinary people at the bottom of the pyramid in the coffee sector value chain. Odongo says that the socials finances model requires any institution that extends a loan to the value chain players to include child labor elimination aspects.
Global research by the ILO established that microloans and cash transfer programs, unintendedly increase child labor, mostly in the agricultural sector value chains in third-world countries. Therefore, the Socials Financial Model would be a suitable solution.
In Uganda the latest national labor force survey, by UBOS, indicates that up to 6.2 million children between 5 or 17 years are involved in labor activities excluding home chores. The prevalence of this vice is mainly in the rural areas, and it’s the agricultural sector that accounts for the most numbers. Uganda is the first country to use this model, and at its launch in November, Betty Amongi the Minster of gender labor and social development reaffirmed the government’s commitment to putting an end to child labor.
“We all know that the prevalence of child labor increased substantially during the Covid-19 lockdown, and the problem is mainly concentrated in the rural areas and in the agricultural sector including commercial farming as well as in the mining sector. For these reasons, the third national development plan has prioritised the fight against child labor in both of these sectors.”
Wellington Chibebe the ILO regional representative for eastern Africa, says that the model is an exact intervention that provides an implementation of the ACCEL program, which tackles the root causes of the child labor problem in the agricultural value chains.
“Child labor is a salient human rights risk to many businesses because of approaches focussing on monitoring of child labor in work places, rather than on trucking the main root causes of the problem, and without addressing them, children will only be displaced from one value chain to another, said Chibebe.
According to Chibebe, the approach provides for the long-term elimination of child labor as it focuses on silos and fragmentation of human and financial resources in the same local area, and it brings together both the public and private sectors. He adds that value chain actors have a big role in the implementation of the model.
Joost Van Ettro, the head of operations at the Netherlands embassy in Uganda, says that the project had a four years timeline and an investment of up to USD 24 million. It is hoped that value chain actors in commercial farming projects including Exporters, Processors, and Input Providers alongside Ministries, Department,s and Agencies, Workers and Employers Representatives, Industry Associations, Non-Government Organizations, and Development Partners, will adopt, replicate the model and implement it within their operations in the selected areas.
