DUSHANBE, November 20, 2012, Asia-Plus — The Agency for Statistics under the President of Tajikistan and t Internal labor Organization (ILO) are conducting a survey to monitor child labor in Tajikistan.
An official source at the Agency for Statistics says the child monitoring targets children aged 5 to 17. The survey that was launched on October 29 and will be completed on November 27 reportedly covers 6,400 households in 400 clusters.
“After the poll, coding of activities will be carried out with use of international classification of activities and types of economic activity,” said the source. “After that, a database will be crated and report will be prepared.”
All works on the project should be completed by July 2013, the source added.
Meanwhile, ILO’s report on child labor monitoring in Tajikistan, which was released in June 2011, notes that labor inspectors often find it difficult to reach out to informal economy workplaces where hazardous child labor occurs most frequently.
The report, in particular, noted that according to estimates of the ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO-IPEC), there are almost 200,000 working children in Tajikistan, and 10 per cent of them have never attended school. What’s more, working children are becoming younger. Today it is no longer a surprise to see working children aged five or six, the report said. 98 per cent of these working children work in agriculture. 80 per cent of working children come from a one-parent family or from a family where the father is a migrant worker
The report said that labor migration of men had a serious impact in terms of increased numbers of child laborers in the country. In the absence of men who work abroad, children have to take responsibility over their family income.
Hazardous working conditions, physically demanding work, inadequate rest, malnutrition, unsanitary working conditions, inevitably affect the children’s health. According to ILO-IPEC, the daily load carried by one child worker may reach 800 kg, the report said.
To monitor the situation of working children involved in the worst forms of child labor, the ILO-IPEC project in Tajikistan helped to establish in 2009 a Child Labor Monitoring System within the National Center for Adult Education under the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection. A Child Labor Monitoring System provides a national/local framework within which a variety of partners can work together to gather and share information on the identification, monitoring, referral, withdrawal and rehabilitation of child workers.
