May 10, 2008	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 4, 1429

KARACHI, May 9: Speakers at a programme on Friday stressed that steps be taken to eliminate child labour from the province and arrangements be made to educate children so that as grown-ups they could lead the country to prosperity.

They were expressing their views at the launch of a five-year programme, ‘Protection and empowerment of working children in Sindh’ under which about 20,000 working children would be removed from hazardous labour in four districts and enrolled in schools.

Besides, training and technical assistance would be provided to their families so that their income might not suffer in the meanwhile.

Under the project being funded by Save the Children, UK, Thardeep Rural Development Programme will spend 2.5 million pounds sterling to take out 20,000 working children from Umerkot, Mithi, Jamshoro and Dadu to send them to schools and provide technical assistance and trainings to their families so that their income could improve. Sindh Assembly Speaker Nisar Khuhro regretted that nothing concrete had been done to eliminate child labour since the country’s inception. Despite a lapse of six decades, majority of which were spent under military dictatorships, the government had not been able to provide basic infrastructure to all parts of the country, he said.

“One of the important reasons why a family sends a child to work is poverty,” he said, adding that unless something was integrated in the child labour project that improved the family’s financial condition such projects had little chance to succeed.

Sindh Information Minister Shazia Marri said people never got tired of saying that children were the country’s future though society as a whole had never been good to them. She said it was unfortunate that a large number of children were physically as well as sexually abused. Besides, she added, many children started working from a very tender age when they should be going to schools.

She regretted that issues faced by children had never been given a priority. According to a study conducted in 1996, she said, there were 300,000 child workers in the province. Since then, however, not a single study had been conducted to weigh the gravity of child labour, which showed lack of political will of the previous governments, she added.

She urged international donors to identify and reach out to the genuine civil society organisations that were yielding positive results by setting their own examples to be replicated in other areas.

Ms Marri also criticised the education institutions being run on a commercial basis, which were charging Rs10,000 from each of their students to print their picture and message on their annual report. She said the government would look into all such cases.

Save the Children’s Country Director Madeline Wright said that 70 per cent of the children working in hazardous trade like carpet weaving, brick kilns, mining, road construction, etc of these four districts would be withdrawn under the project. She said that about 4,000 children would be given secondary education through scholarships and 5,000 children would be imparted vocational trainings. Over 5,000 villages would be developed and organised to raise their level of sustenance. The project would ensure regular incomes for skilled workers by developing artisan villages, cooperatives, providing market intelligence and by linking them with financial institutions, she added.

Thardeep Rural Development Programme chief Dr Sono Khangharani said that arid zones in Sindh comprised 68,000 square kilometres representing 48 per cent of the geographical area of the province. With an average rainfall of between 20 milimitres and 310mm, its population of over 1.6 million faced ongoing drought conditions. He said that hostile terrain, lack of economic opportunities and widespread poverty had made development in this region a challenge that had been taken by the TRDP and Save the Children.

Dr Sulaiman Shaikh, Simi Kamal, child Prashant Sharma, Amer Habib and others also spoke at the function. A tableau was performed and a documentary was screened to highlight the issues faced by working children. A large number of women and children from the project area were also present.