Simrin Singh, senior specialist on child labour in the ILO’s Decent Work Technical Support Team for East and South-East Asia and the Pacific

This place is a learning centre for child domestic workers, operated by a long-time ILO partner – the NGO Mitra Imadei - with the full support of neighbours and the local municipal authorities. It took years to convince the authorities and employers that child labour in domestic work is not acceptable and that these children need care, protection and an opportunity to learn, so that they could enjoy the fruits of “decent work” as adults.

The bright, healthy and confident faces of the children here are testament to the fact that the approach has paid off.

However, meeting with these young people is also a stark reminder that millions of children – many of them girls – face profound, hidden exploitation in domestic work. They endure long, irregular hours of work, arduous working conditions, are deprived of schooling and are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.

Sleeping on the kitchen floor, suffering beatings and verbal abuse, eating sub-standard food, no wages, and not being allowed to visit their families – These are all-too- familiar stories.

Such experiences limit their path to and aspirations for decent work when they are older.

Domestic workers are commonly not considered employees. So employers simply don’t recognize that they have the same kind of obligations that exist in other employment situations. Girls often face a double burden of combining long hours of chores at home with domestic work outside the household. These deeply entrenched cultural values and attitudes pose significant obstacles.

This year, the theme of World Day against Child Labour, on 12 June*, will be “NO to Child Labour in Domestic Work.”  The choice is timely, given the adoption of ILO Convention 189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers, which says only people of legal working age should carry out domestic work, and includes special protections for those under 18.

Worldwide, there are millions of child domestic labourers, mostly girls. Many of these children are below minimum age for employment, while those who are above the minimum age find themselves largely unprotected by laws geared towards formal sector employment.

“It’s time to take action to protect these vulnerable child domestic labourers and let them reach their dreams.”

*The ILO will be releasing a report on 12 June, “Ending child labour in domestic work.”

Mutoba Ngoma
Founder and CEO of Tapera Bio Industries Limited, he received entrepreneurship training as part of the ILO’s Youth Employment Project in Zambia.

As the sun comes up over Lusaka, a city I share with 2 million others, business is well under way and has been since 3 a.m. The trucks carrying produce from the farms around the city are the first to arrive in the early hours before I wake.

As soon as I do, I am up and out, looking for new contacts and investments to help support and grow my bio-fuel company. Such is the life of a young entrepreneur in this town. Every day is a new opportunity to meet the challenges of keeping a small business alive.

I’m 28 but first started my business in 2006 when I was 21, after being inspired by a TV documentary on renewable energy in Brazil. I put the project on hold for a while to work as an aircraft technician at Zambian Airways Limited. However, they went out of business and I came back to the bio-fuel idea. My alternatives were few, as formal, decent employment opportunities are hard to come by in my country. In fact, a vast majority of young workers are in the informal economy.

I convinced my father to partner with me in the bio-fuel business and initially it was a success. We had seven employees, who were paid a decent salary, above the minimum wage. But this is a new industry in Zambia and it’s hard to compete with the big companies selling fossil fuels. It’s also difficult to find the raw materials we need. At first, we collected waste cooking oil from restaurants to recycle into bio diesel and natural soap but this is now in short supply. Waste oil is often sold instead to low income households, for people to re-use at home, which is a real health hazard.

I am waiting for the local authorities to implement a ban on the irresponsible disposal of used cooking oil, by authorizing registered businesses like mine to properly dispose of it through renewable energy, which would be a service to the community, as well as a help to my business. Without the raw materials and because of tough competition from the big producers, I have had to cut back my staff to two and produce only soap with the vegetable oil I collect myself.

Many of my friends are in a similar position but we try to help each other and are constantly looking for new investment opportunities. Some friends grow tree seedlings on their land to sell to the government for the national re-forestation programme; another one refurbishes car brake pads. I have also partnered with a friend in a mushroom growing and production business.

There is a real entrepreneurial spirit here but it is often in the informal sector and based on small trading which doesn’t always add value to the local economy. Sometimes the challenges may seem insurmountable but I always try to push forward and keep gaining skills and experience.

The training I have completed has been a great help to me in terms of developing entrepreneurial skills and understanding how to run a successful enterprise. It has also provided ideas on developing contacts and building partnerships to access funding to help grow my business.

Education and training are important but opportunity is a bigger factor. I have been lucky enough to have had good support and advice but an enabling environment needs to be created at the country level for all young people. With the right support, young people themselves can help tackle the youth employment crisis. We have the ideas and the motivation. We just need the opportunity and support.

My plan and ambition is to buy land on which to grow my own castor beans for oil and so produce bio-fuels, create jobs for other young people and help the Zambian economy. This is my story as a young entrepreneur in Zambia but I believe many other young people from Africa and from around the world have a similar story to tell.

There has been a return to peace in Nepal, after over a decade of civil conflict. The ILO’s Yves Perardel travelled to Kathmandu in preparation for a survey of young people and their experience of leaving school to enter the world of work. Taking his camera to the streets, he sees a city in transition, young people here, he says, have hope for growth and stability.

Dennis Zulu

By Dennis Zulu, Chief Program Officer, ILO Office for Nigeria, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The room was filled with about 50 excited Liberian youth, all sporting white T-shirts with the inscription “Graduate” printed on the back.

The young women and men had completed three-month apprenticeships with enterprises in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. For many of them, this was the first time in their lives that they had received any form of training, let alone a certificate.

And many had hopes their new skills would open the door to a bright future.

Unfortunately, if past experience was anything to go by, it would not be long before they would face the reality of unemployment head on.

After the ceremony, at which I had presented the certificates, one of the new graduates asked whether I could help him get funds to start a business. He had never heard of microfinance institutions but said he had tried – without success – to borrow money from friends and relatives.

He was convinced his newly acquired skills would enable him to start and run a successful business, and could then help his unemployed father provide for their large family.

I asked what options he had if he could not start the business. He said he feared he might have to go the way of many of his friends who had turned to a life of crime.

Liberia has been at peace for over a decade. But the high youth unemployment rate threatens stability in a country where about 70 per cent of the population is under the age of 30.

Liberian youth have had high expectations since the end of the civil war and demand jobs and improved livelihoods. But these demands have largely remained unmet, despite impressive economic growth rates.

The war deprived young Liberians of the opportunity to get an education: almost 40 per cent of Liberians over 15 years old have never attended school. Young people roam the streets, having none of the skills or experience needed for the few jobs that are available.

Liberia has a labour force of 1.13 million, but only 195,000 people are in paid employment.

Despite unemployment being so high, sometimes it is hard for employers to find candidates with the right set of skills. As many young people lack the numeracy and literacy skills required by technical and vocational training institutions, solving this situation in the short run is not easy.

On top of that, training schools use outdated curricula and have a lack of staff and physical infrastructure. They are therefore ill-equipped to produce graduates who are prepared for the labour market.

The informal economy is often the only available option for Liberian youth – from operating motorcycle taxis, to selling second-hand clothes.

Unfortunately, most of them work under precarious conditions and have little or no support in entrepreneurship training, business development services or access to finance. Consequently, they are unable to grow their businesses or work themselves out of poverty.

In my work I meet a lot of young Liberians who, despite these challenges, are still eager for opportunities to improve their education and ultimately secure good jobs or run successful business.

A lot is already being done by the government of Liberia and many other stakeholders with respect to policy reform and access to basic education, skills development, finance, jobs and income-generating opportunities.

The ILO has implemented successful programmes to generate employment, including the Poverty Reduction through Employment Creation, and three Employment Intensive Investment Programmes, focused on road infrastructure.

Given the magnitude of the problem, it is crucial that the issue be tackled urgently and that programmes have a wide enough scope to meet the hopes and expectations of my graduate friend and the many other Liberian youth looking for jobs.

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Guy Ryder

By Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labour Organization

Global youth unemployment has become a reservoir of wasted talent and a tinderbox of frustration.

With 75 million young people jobless around the world, tackling this crisis must be a key priority.

It’s no easy task. Youth unemployment is the sharpest edge of the global labour crisis and it’s also the toughest nut to crack. But it’s a challenge we must meet head on.

We have tried for quite some time to make the case about learning from countries that have youth guarantee schemes, and we should turn up the volume on this one.

The idea is to guarantee that a young person who is out of education and out of work is given a job or training, as well as counselling and guidance.

This is not a utopia. Such programmes have proved quite successful in Nordic countries as well as in Germany and Austria.

In these times of crisis, governments are obviously concerned about the additional spending, but they should bear in mind the far higher cost that would come from young unemployed people permanently losing touch with the labour market.

Youth guarantee schemes are affordable. Our research shows that they would cost less than half of one per cent of GDP in Eurozone countries. It’s a sound investment on which one can get very good returns very rapidly. In Sweden, for example, almost 50 per cent of young jobseekers got work or training as a result of the guarantee; in Norway, the success rate is even higher.

There’s also a lot to be learned from Germany’s dual education system, which combines a workplace apprenticeship and vocational training. This is not something that can be replicated wholesale elsewhere, but there are certainly lessons to be learned, elements that can be applied successfully.

And we need to give more weight to active labour market policies. Job placement, public employment services, investments in skills – all of these areas are tremendously underexploited.

All the evidence shows that if a young person is out of work for a year or more at the beginning of their career, that will affect them throughout their working life. There’s no way back for most of them.

The first thing to do is to get jobs moving globally and making sure young people get a good start in their working lives.

There is an expense and a loss of production in keeping people out of work, so let’s attack the problem at the source. We must act urgently, we must act now.

This blog entry was also published in The Huffington Post on October 1 2012

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