ILO and partners launch first community centres in Lebanon to combat child labour

An ILO-supported community centre in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley provides a child-friendly space for working children to receive support form trained social workers. ©ILO ZAHLE (ILO NEWS)—The ILO, Lebanon’s Ministry of Labour and the BEYOND Association have launched a joint initiative to establish and support a series of community centres to provide a range of services aimed at combatting child labour in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley as well as South Lebanon and Beirut. The first centre has opened in the Beqaa and was constructed with the financial support of the Norway chapter of Lions Clubs International and capacity building from ILO’s Denmark-led Regional Development and Protection Programme (RDPP), a three-year seven-donor initiative managed by Denmark to support Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

“The launch of these community centres constitutes the first concrete and tangible step towards building physical and institutional infrastructure to combat child labour in problem areas such as Lebanon’s Bekaa valley,” said Frank Hagemann, Deputy Regional Director of the ILO Regional Office for the Arab States. “Now that these centres are in place, government and civil society can organize their work to offer comprehensive inter-related solutions to households which engage in child labour, as well as ensure that the inalienable rights of all children to benefit from education and are upheld.”

Open throughout the day, the Beqaa community centres will provide capacity building for social workers in order to enable them to provide appropriate attendance and rehabilitation to working children as well as children at risk of engagement in child labour, especially its worst forms. In addition to ongoing ILO support to increase the capacity of existing centres to offer services to working street children in Beirut, a second centre in South Lebanon is also being constructed with the support of the Government of Norway.

Best practice training tools to combat child labour such as the ILO programme Supporting Children's Rights through Education, the Arts and the Media (SCREAM) are now being employed in the community centres. In addition, social workers are also being trained in methods to combat child labour in Lebanon’s agriculture sector, an issue which has significantly worsened since the onset of the Syrian refugee crisis in the country.

The RDPP has contributed US$654,000 to fund an ILO project entitled “Tackling child labour among Syrian refugees and their host communities in Jordan and Lebanon,” which aims to provide practical and sustainable solutions to combat child labour among Syrian refugees and host communities in Lebanon and Jordan. The project adopts a dual-track approach to tackling child labour by enacting policy reforms in refugee host communities as well as building the capacity of government, worker and employer institutions to combat and prevent child labour. Similarly, the project also works through a multi-stakeholder approach to address issues pertaining to child labour with employers’ and workers’ organizations, refugee community leaders, government agencies (Municipalities, General Security Office, the Ministry of Social Affairs), social workers and working children’s households.