"If there is child labour, public policies are missing"

BUENOS AIRES (OIT Noticias) — "Where there is firewood and water hauling, where there are children to take care of, where someone cannot go to school due to lack of roads, rain or lack of connectivity, what we have, above all, is a deficit that we must fulfill as a national State," said Florencia Lance, head of the Red de Abordaje Institucional con Pueblos Indígenas of the Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA, National Institute of Agricultural Technology). "When there is child labour in family, peasant and indigenous farming families, what is lacking are public policies," she said.

Her testimony is part of a series of six audiovisual stories presented by the Country Office of the International Labour Organization (ILO) for Argentina, which were produced as part of the project "Offside: ¡Marcando la cancha!” These stories make visible the problem of child labour, which in Argentina affects 1 out of every 10 children and adolescents under 15 years of age. This figure doubles in rural areas of the country, where poverty and vulnerability levels are higher.

According to the INTA referent, the cooperation between the institute and the Organization was formalized in a memorandum of understanding signed in 2019, which allowed INTA to expand its institutional agenda and incorporate new perspectives of action. "The first activities we carried out were to raise awareness among technicians and technicians, researchers and researchers, extensionists, around the concept of decent work to understand what contributions we can make from our institution to achieve it," explained Lance.

In addition to structuring an annual training plan for its agents with decent work as an articulating axis, thanks to the support of the ILO, INTA carried out research on the relationship between child labor and the reality of family, peasant and indigenous agriculture in different areas of the country.

In 2021, the ILO and INTA presented the conclusions of the study on the collaboration of water access technologies in the reduction of child labor. In 2022, another study was concluded with a focus on the impact of firewood collection on the rights of children and adolescents, the results of which include a playful proposal to address the issue of child labor in the communities.

Regarding the research carried out together with the Offside project, Lance said: "We did not want to build data to point fingers or stigmatize families. Today we have a lot of information, we have to start working to solve all the issues that cause child labour to exist".

Offside: ¡Marcando la cancha!

Led by the ILO office in the country and with the participation of a broad institutional network, the project "Offside: ¡Marcando la cancha!" aims to generate knowledge and public policies to eradicate child labour in rural areas of Argentina. The program, which focuses on the garlic, tomato and cotton production sectors in the provinces of Buenos Aires, Mendoza and Santa Fe, is funded by the United States Department of Labor (USDOL).