Script:
Look closely in the vibrant street markets of Rabat or Casablanca, and you’ll find hundreds of children, some as young seven years old, working 40 hours or more every week. There are more than 600,000 child labourers in Morocco, 11% of the country’s children. And half of them are girls.
El Bouchtaouia, Former Domestic Labourer
I have been working as a domestic labourer in South Morocco for two years. I was working hard. My employers were beating me. Whenever I saw children going to school it reminded me that I could not go to school myself and I was heartbroken.
With no chance to go to school, El Bouchtaouia (boook-tah-we’-uh) and others like her will grow up illiterate, poor, and desperate.
But on a cliff edge along the rocky Moroccan shore a sign of hope is rising above the crumbling walls of an old fortress. Inside is another world: not one of desperation, but a world of magic, illusion, excitement, and a chance at a new life.
Here, at the “circus school”, children trapped in the cycle of poverty and child labour can experience a world they never dreamed possible. Thanks to the efforts of a local community group, after free lessons in juggling and trapeze practice, they spend time in a nearby classroom, going to school just like most other girls their age.
Outside the circus tent, the realities in Morocco are slowly changing. Child labour rates have fallen slightly in the past ten years; experts with ILO’s International Program for the Elimination of Child Labour and other organizations say that’s in part due to innovative programs like the “circus school” and to a dramatic rise in school enrollment. Morocco now offers primary school education to almost all children, with enrollment jumping from 52 percent in 1991 to 92 percent today.
El Bouchtaouia is one of the success stories. She’s 16 now, and in the 5th year of her primary education. Child labour is part of her past, not her future.
But the risks remain.
Sriani Ameratunga-Kring, Bureau for Gender Equality, ILO
In Morocco, more than 40% of the population are at or below the poverty line. That makes it all the more likely that a death, a divorce, or a disability in the family will mean that children will be sent out to work to replace lost family income.
For girls like El Bouchtaouia, the “circus school” is no illusion, it is a dream come true: a unique chance at an education, and the skills to win a paying job, and a better life, for her and her family.