This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Is school the solution to child labour? Not everywhere, and not for all children

By:   []

Date: 2022-02 

I would like to be able to support the idea that school creates a barrier to child labour, and perhaps is even the solution to eliminating it. This common, widespread perception is surely a source of hope for anyone dismayed by the prevalence of working children in the world today. But it does not stand up to empirical evidence.

At first glance, school or work can seem to be a question of either/or. In West Africa, for example, the majority of working children are not in formal school, and the majority of children fully enrolled in formal school are not working on the side. But if you look closer at the lives of working children, you find a more complex relationship at work. On the one hand, it is clear that school in itself is not enough to protect children from being put to work. And, on the other, for many young people working is essential for the continuation of their education, and not only in financial terms.

This text offers readers a chance to take seriously what working children and adolescents in West Africa tell us. Where are they with school and education, and what could be done today to support their education and integration into society? Their answers show us how reductive it is to still think of school and work as two (strictly) separate realms.

The voices drawn on for this article come from socio-ethnographic surveys conducted in Senegal between 2015 and 2020 in various sectors of the urban informal economy: in total, some 60 adolescents – girls and boys, mostly aged between 12 and 20 – were interviewed. They are petty traders, cart pushers, touts, baggage handlers, shoe shiners in markets or train stations, all-purpose workers in small restaurants, domestic servants (salaried or unpaid family helpers), apprentices in sewing, welding, carpentry, mechanics workshops, and apprentice drivers.

Their accounts show a great diversity of work experiences, either one-off or long-lasting, but rarely linear, and sometimes starting from the age of nine or ten years old. These surveys complement other socio-ethnographic research that has been carried out over the past 20 years with child workers in West Africa. By listening to these voices, we can better understand the situations of working children, better protect them, and perhaps finally imagine the conditions of a world in which harmful child labour cannot thrive.

Knowledge without opportunity

Let there be no mistake: few families today, and especially few children, fail to understand the importance of schooling. For girls and boys alike, learning is a necessary ingredient in any projection towards a (better) future. Yet, in Senegal in 2013, more than 47% of school-age children (6-16 years) were not in school.

This disconnect cannot be explained by reasons of economic scarcity alone. Multiple factors are intertwined: economic, certainly, but also socio-cultural, socio-demographic, linguistic, health, psycho-pedagogical and political. When we listen to them, the children describe the difficulties and contradictions of the school system as it exists today. They find it at times strongly distanced from their personal or family aspirations and obligations, but they also find in its functioning and malfunctioning a near-certain path to upward social mobility.
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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/is-school-the-solution-to-child-labour-not-everywhere-and-not-for-all-children/
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