Dar es Salaam (ILO News): The ILO, in collaboration with the Prime Minister's Office Policy, Parliamentary Affairs, Ministry of Labour, Youth and Employment and Tanzania Federation of Disabled People's Organizations, organized national stakeholder consultation from 22 - 23 February 2016 in Dar es Salaam.
The consultations aimed sharing experiances of past ILO work in combatting child labour and setting strategies that will be applied in ARISE II (Achieving Reduction of Child Labour in Support of Education) Project.
According to the national Integrated Labour Force Survey Report, 2014, the overall child labour rate in Tanzania is 28.8% equivalent to 4.2 million children. Child labour is more prevalent in the rural compared to urban areas and around 92% of working children engage in the agriculture sector.
The workshop helped to raise awareness among the participants on the difference between child work and child labour, as welll as the different forms of child labour in the context of Tabora region. Hilda Boniphace, District Cooperative Officer, in Tabora said, “I have learned during these consultations that the communities do not know the difference between child labour and child work. Now every time when I will be engaging with the communities, I will make sure that I explain to them the difference between the two concepts.”
The ARISE project was set up as a partnership between the ILO, Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and Winrock International. The project aims at developing and implementing programmes that progressively eliminate child labour, by addressing the underlying social and economic factors that drive smallholder tobacco farmers to engage children in hazardous work. Other countries already participating in the project include Malawi, Zambia and Brazil, which were selected based on their engagement in tobacco production using child labourers and high record of school children dropouts. The preparatory phase of ARISE II in Tanzania will focus on ensuring an enabling environment to combat child labour in tobacco growing communities at national and local levels.
Tanzania has ratified the ILO Convention No. 182 on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour and No. 138 on the Minimum Age for Employment. Child labour issues have been mainstreamed in the Employment and Labour Relations Act No. 6, the Child Development Policy, the Law of the Child Act as well as in the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty and (MKUKUTA).
