Coming Together to Eliminate Child Labor
LATACUNGA, Ecuador — By the time morning comes, Marta Tigasi has already put in five hours of backbreaking work for the family business.
After a brief nap following the day's activities, she's up at 10 p.m. every evening, pouring and mixing batches of cement and water, piling the lumpy mortar into hills as tall as she is. Each night, Marta prepares three of these mounds of cement mix, which will later be used to form the concrete blocks that are her family's livelihood.
After that — instead of hitting the sack — the 8-year-old girl with callused hands heads to school.
Marta Tigasi, center, with two of her classmates.
Almost all of the 70 or so children at Marta's elementary school work. Although Latacunga is the capital of Ecuador's Cotopaxi province — a cool, wet region known for its flower and fruit production — the area is poor, and many children help their families carve out a meager living making concrete blocks.
"My kids get up at 4 a.m. to go to work and then they come to school at 7:30 a.m.," says Gladys Guerrero, principal. "Most of them are tired and some of them are injured — their hands and their backs hurt — but how, when their families are so poor and they rely on the help of their children, can I tell their mothers they shouldn't work?"
Convincing her students and their families that an education is essential is one of Mrs. Guerrero's biggest challenges.
CRS is helping through the Support Our Youth (SOY!) project. Aimed at eliminating and preventing child labor, particularly in Ecuador's large banana and flower industries, the CRS-led project works in 11 municipalities and 130 rural communities.
Now in its second year, SOY! works by helping individuals and institutions, private enterprise and communities come together to develop high-quality education programs for child and adolescent workers at risk of leaving school. The project also encourages municipal governments to design and implement plans, regulations and public policies that support education for this vulnerable group of children.
Keeping Children in School
With 779,000 children between the ages of 5 and 17 working, Ecuador has one of the highest rates of child labor in all of Latin America. About 60 percent of child laborers attend school, but that number drops to 40 percent as children reach the age of 15.
Child brickmakers show their callused hands.
While extreme poverty is the major force keeping children in the country's fields and out of its classrooms, there are other hurdles. The education system, which receives only 12 percent of the national budget, is weak and rarely responds to the reality of the rural poor.
Chronically underpaid teachers are discouraged by what they see as an outdated and irrelevant national curriculum. Many miss class often. Some abandon their posts altogether.
And while the Ecuadorian government guarantees a free public education for every child, the associated costs of fees, uniforms, supplies and transit are often too great for people to bear.
Working with local ministries of education and social service agencies, SOY! has provided books, uniforms and other supplies to more than 3,600 children. Parents, teachers, students and local authorities are working together to improve education by making improvements to schools and offering distance-learning courses and technical training for teachers, among other things.
"One of our goals is for municipal governments to take a leadership role in this endeavor, so that they use their budgets to help communities continue to improve education," says Cesar Paredes, CRS program manager for SOY!
The project will serve as a model to be replicated in other parts of Ecuador.
Already the project has had some success. The banana-growing municipality of Pasaje in the province of El Oro, for example, recently pledged to fund 1,500 scholarships. And in December, a national coalition of children's rights advocates presented newly elected President Rafael Correa with the coalition's plan for improving the rights and lives of children across the country. The plan was endorsed by more than 1 million children and adolescents in Ecuador, many of them SOY! members.
The SOY! consortium is led by CRS and includes Save the Children United Kingdom, CARE International, Fundacion Wong and the Ecuadorian Catholic Episcopal Conference.
