South-South Cooperation: a path to eliminating child labour in Latin America

Anita Amorim, ILO Senior External Relations Specialist: South-South and UN Affairs

Anita Amorim, ILO Senior External Relations Specialist: South-South and UN Affairs

The Global South-South Development Expo (GSSD Expo) is an annual event organized by the UN System to showcase innovative solutions that have proven effective in one country and have been successfully replicated and adapted to other countries from the Global South. In the framework of this event, the ILO organizes an annual “Solution Forum” which focuses on decent-work solutions devised by governments and workers’ and employers’ organizations from the Global South.

Since I started working on South-South Cooperation at the ILO in 2005, we have been actively promoting these kinds of exchanges between countries from the South. Brazil, for example, has been an active development partner for the ILO, supporting cooperation programmes mainly in Latin America and Africa.

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How I went from child labour to a prestigious academy

A tobacco plantation isn’t a safe or healthy place to work for a child, but it was the only way my family could survive. My parents are poor farmers and barely able to support a family of eight on MK20,000. This is about US$ 50 per year. I had nothing. My parents are tobacco tenants and we all had to work together as a family. I’ve been working in tobacco since I was five. Attending school was never an option for me.

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Hitting the right note for the Red Card to Child Labour Campaign

The launch date was set in stone. 12 June; World Day Against Child Labour; opening day of the football World Cup. With just months to go, we were looking for a big idea that would enable us to harness the power of communications to reach traditional and new audiences with a strong message about the 168 million children in child labour.

We had not planned on using that most ancient way of expression – music – but through our artists’ engagement programme, Artworks, we learnt that a US musician, Mike Einziger, was interested in the ILO’s work and wanted to contribute. He is the Grammy-nominated lead guitarist for the rock band, Incubus, who wrote the guitar riff for one of the biggest pop songs of 2013, Wake Me Up. We set up a meeting and he told us he wanted to write us a song about child labour. Download the song Learn about the campaign
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