Main sections National Legislation and Policies Against Child Labour in Nepal IPEC Action in Nepal Other Initiatives Against Child Labour in Nepal Download full text - PDF 144 KB See also Information Resources Nepal

Sustainable Elimination of Bonded Labour in Nepal (SEBL) - IPEC/Declaration Project

Phase - I

The joint IPEC/Declaration Project aimed to rehabilitate bonded adult and child labourers and to prevent them re-entering exploitative forms of labour. The intervention strategy consisted of:

• Direct action targeted at ex-Kamaiyas, their families and children in order to secure their effective release from bondage and to sustainably reduce their poverty through training and education and livelihood improvement;
• Capacity and alliance building among key actors — the Government, workers' and employers' organizations, and civil society — for policy development and programme formulation at the national and district levels;
• Awareness raising campaigns among ex-Kamaiyas, their landlords and society at large. Another important component of the project is to ensure sustainability through data collection, research, and the implementation of a tracking system.

The direct beneficiaries of the project were ex-Kamaiyas and children under the Kamaiya system and those still de facto in debt bondage or at risk of falling into bondage in the eight districts of western Nepal — Banke, Bardia, Dang, Kailali, Kanchanpur, Nawalparasi, Rupandehi, and Kapilvastu. Since women and girls are at high risk of bondage due to the prevailing gender discrimination norms in these communities, priority target groups were Kamaiya women and girls aged under 18 years.

The project also worked in close collaboration with the ILO subregional Project on Preventing and Eliminating of Bonded Labour in South Asia (PEBLISA) in Nepal, which focused on prevention of bonded labour through various strategies, including micro finance.

Phase I of the project was successful in:

• providing the Out of School Programme (OSP) to 2,812 children (1,537 girls and 1,278 boys) and formal schooling to 6,116 children (2,934 girls and 3,182 boys);
• preventing 9,984 children (2,060 girls and 5,015 boys) and withdrawing 153 girl children from exploitative work;
• convincing almost all former Kamaiyas to send their children to school;
• providing basic literacy to 3,512 adults (2,849 women and 663 men), vocational/skills training to 641 (185 women and 456 men), and income generating activities to 17 (11 women and six men);
• establishing vigilance committees of freed Kamaiyas in many villages by DECONT, GEFONT, and NTUC under the action programmes to monitor implementation of labour standards and monitoring incidence of bondage and child labour. These committees have been strengthened through training to discharge their roles and responsibilities effectively in the communities;
• raising awareness on the Kamaiya Prohibition Labour Act as well as raising awareness on issues such as minimum wages, gender, education, and micro enterprises;
• initiating joint action with other agencies working in the field in the construction of a water supplycum- irrigation project at Lalmatiya in Dang district, as well as for the rehabilitation of former Kamaiyas in five Kamaiya prone districts.

The achievements of Phase II have been:

• the project has withdrawn 613 children from hazardous work and has prevented 501 children from engaging in the worst forms of child labour. The children from both these categories are being provided education and training services;
• the family members of former child labourers are engaged in viable income generating activities involving small businesses in all the project districts;
• 40 per cent of agricultural workers among target families receive the minimum wage;
• additionally, 30 per cent of female agricultural workers among the target families receive equal wages as their male counterparts; and
• by the end of the project, the Child Labour Probition Act and the Kamaiya Labour Prohibition Act (2001) will be harmonized with ILO Conventions 138, 182 on Child Labour and 105 and 29 on Forced Labour.