Project of Support to the National Action Plan to Combat Child Labour in Malawi

Executive Summary Malawi, like most other Sub-Sahara African countries continues to experience child labour in a number of sectors in the country. At least 37% of the children between 5 and 15 years of age were involved in child labour in 2002. Child labour is found mainly in agriculture and the community/ personal service sector. Other forms of child labour are found in the sales (wholesale and retail), quarrying, mining, construction, manufacturing, street work and commercial sexual exploitation. In 1999, the Government of Malawi ratified both the ILO’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182) and the Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138). The Government continues to show further commitment and effort towards its goal of eliminating the worst forms of child labour by 2016 through the development of a Child Labour Policy and a National Action Plan (NAP) on the Elimination of Child Labour. Both documents are in draft form awaiting endorsement. The Government of Malawi has also developed a list of hazardous work that is waiting to be published. To date, Malawi has implemented two successful child labour programmes funded mainly by the United States Department of Labor (USDOL). The most significant achievements under the two programmes were the drafting of the National Action Plan and the list of hazardous tasks; the development of a database on child labour within the Ministry of Labour; the development of successful models of intervention for prevention and withdrawal from child labour, and models for the support of adult caregivers that are available for replication at a countrywide level. The main challenges experienced were the following: firstly, information on the incidence of child labour countrywide remains scarce in spite of the programmes having conducted rapid assessments and other studies. Secondly, the efforts to institutionalise the interventions on child labour to ensure effective coordination at national level started late during the implementation of the second programme. Lastly, the strategies used were sector based and did not effectively deal with children who were shifting from targeted sectors to non-targeted sectors. Taking into account the good practices developed and the lessons learnt from previous projects and experiences from other countries, the proposed project plans, over a period of 39 months at a total cost of US$ 2,757,621, to enhance the efforts of the Government of Malawi by supporting the finalisation and implementation of the NAP, in line with the Malawi Growth Development Strategy’s overall priority on poverty reduction and the draft Decent Work Country Programme priority of “Creating more and better employment and income generation opportunities particularly for the vulnerable groups including the youth, women and people with disabilities, as well as ensuring the elimination of the worst forms of child labour.” To do this, the following three immediate objectives have been set for the project. The first contributes to the creation of an enabling legislative and policy environment on the elimination of child labour towards the global goal of elimination of the worst forms of child labour by 2016. This is in support of the first objective of the NAP which recognises the need to provide a conducive legal and policy framework as a starting point in trying to eliminate child labour. In implementing this objective, the project will strengthen and build the Ministry of Labour’s capacity as the lead institution as well as institutionalise project activities as a way of ensuring sustainability once the project comes to an end. The second objective will lay the foundations for child labour free zones using an integrated area based approach (IABA) in three districts where the Worst Forms of Child Labor (WFCL) are found. This objective will also replicate and improve the models already developed, particularly in child domestic work, in a fourth district. A key component under th

Project symbol

MLW/09/50/USA

Admin unit

CO-Lusaka

Start date

30/09/2009

End date

31/03/2013

Total allocation

2757621

Total expenditure

Status

Closed

2653541

Development Partners

USA, United States Department of Labor, Bureau for International Labor Affairs, Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor and Human Trafficking

Country/Countries

Malawi

Outcomes

Child Labour