Focus on fight against child labour

A single gunshot shattered the night silence in a small village in Pakistan's Punjab Province in April 1995. A youth was killed and his cousin seriously wounded. The two were riding a bicycle. The murder of the child became an international incident, and its aftershocks changed the entire carpet-weaving industry of Pakistan. Iqbal Masih's killing sparked widespread international condemnation of the carpet-weaving industry of Pakistan, because he had been a children's rights campaigner and had worked as a child labourer himself. His murder, though unrelated to his activities, brought Pakistan under international scrutiny, with possibilities of sanctions by the West on Pakistani carpets, and also on the football-stitching industry. The incident became a watershed for the two industries - major export earners after cotton and textiles - which sprang into action and decided to change the way they did business and to rehabilitate their tarnished image. With the help of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations Children's Fund, and encouraged by bilateral assistance from the West, including that of the United States, the two industries decided to make tangible efforts to eliminate, or at best, reduce child labour, which was becoming a bane for the country's tattered image. In 1997, both embarked on child labour elimination programmes. Today, the industries are reaping the benefits of their efforts - widely endorsed and acknowledged by those who had accused them in the past of exploiting children. While football manufacturers have more or less eradicated child labour in the Pakistani city of Sialkot, carpet makers are still working hard on how to curb the social evil, born out of the extreme poverty of rural landless labourers. Nasir Dogar, manager of the ILO football project in Sialkot, told IRIN that a programme was started in 1997 with an aim to eliminate child labour in the football-stitching industry. The programme was voluntary, and anyone joining it had to open up its facilities for monitoring by the ILO. There are 20 monitors and 97 companies who are members of the project today. "On that basis, we can safely say that we did not find child labour during our monitoring of the facilities," Dogar said, adding that the member companies represented the source of about 95 percent of all football exports from Pakistan. Sialkot meets about 65 percent of the world's total demand for quality leather footballs. It exports up to 35 million balls a year. The procedure of the programme required the football manufacturers to provide the ILO monitors with a list of all places where the balls were being stitched. This helped the manufacturers to better organise their work, thereby also helping them in product and quality control. "The spin-off has been very positive for them," Dogar added. Industry representatives agree that eliminating child labour has helped them in business, improved their international image, and created a positive social situation for the poor children of the region. Khawaja Zakauddin, a leading Sialkot industrialist, whose factory is making footballs for the 2002 World Cup, told IRIN that the objective of the programme was to phase out child labour and to rehabilitate the children involved. The programme was aimed at creating education facilities for up to 7,000 children. Already more than 6,000 children have been enrolled in schools and taken away from work, Zakauddin said. Dogar pointed out that a second phase of child education had started, under which another 2,100 children would be provided with education - exceeding than the original target. Most of the leading export houses have now set up stitching-centres, eliminating the middle-man, or subcontractor, directly employing adults for ball-making. The employees, whose monthly salary depends on the number of balls made, nevertheless, get free medical cover, free transport and one free meal a day. "It has completely changed the outlook of the people and the business," Rizwan Dar, head of Corporate Social Responsibility and another leading manufacturer, told IRIN. His company employs up to 6,000 stitchers and more than 2,000 other staff. "We were the first to set up stitching centres... challenging the subcontracting system," he said, noting that the company's owner, Khurshid Sufi, had been mocked by his friends, who said it would not work. "At that time, he was being told he was a lunatic, these are mobile forces and nobody will come to the stitching centre," Dar recalled. "But the opposite has happened," he said, and that was because people wanted to be employed by the companies because of the perks and extra benefits. The success story of phasing out child labour in the football-stitching industry is not replicated in the carpet-weaving sector, where most of the work is still done at home, and monitoring is not as simple. However, with bilateral and donor help, in collaboration with the ILO, the industry is bringing the menace of child labour under control. "Under a programme that started with ILO's help in 1997, there are more than 300 schools where about 14,000 children are studying," Latif Malik, chairman of the Pakistan Carpet Manufacturers and Exporters Association (PCMEA), told IRIN in Lahore, capital of Punjab Province. "These children are mostly from areas where carpet making goes on." The association has spent close to a million US dollars on the programme, in which several NGOs are also involved. Malik said he had written to the ILO for an extension of the programme up to April 2003 as it had expired on May 2002. "If you visit those schools, you will have real satisfaction that these children are now studying," he added. According to the industry, more than 30,000 children may be working alongside their parents in small village homes weaving carpets. The education and rehabilitation programme at the moment aims to reach close to 22,000 such children. "We still have a long way to go," Malik said, but pointed out that the situation had changed substantially from the past, when the industry was also accused of using bonded labour and perpetrating other rights abuses. He said after Masih's murder and the negative publicity it generated there was a threat that the industry might not survive. However, due to their verifiable efforts, exports picked up in 1999/2000, though the events of 11 September had caused loss of business. "During July-April this year, there has been a 16 percent decline in exports," Malik lamented, explaining that it was mainly due to the 11 September events. Pakistan exported carpets worth $191 million up to April from July against $226 million in the same period of last fiscal year. Only an hour's drive from Lahore, the fruits of the these labours - the combined efforts of the United Nations agencies, NGOs, the government and the industry itself - are there to be seen. About 30 bright young faces over khaki uniforms swayed back and forth reciting and learning English. These are students of a primary school opened by the PCMEA this year and already more than 101 children have enrolled. The school, tucked away in a small but well-built structure in a squalid neighbourhood of the small Punjabi town of Kamonki, an hour's drive from Lahore, represents the only chance for extremely poor parents to educate their children. "There are schools, both private and government, in the area," the principal, Zahida Ya'qub told IRIN. "But many parents did not send their children to those schools, because they were either very expensive or the standard of education was very low.". On payment of a nominal fee - waived in cases where parents cannot afford it - a child is provided with free books and a uniform. Several children in the school came from extremely poor families involved in carpet-weaving. "There would have been many children who would not have been able to get an education if this school had not started," Ya'qub said, as a visiting mother nodded in agreement. "This school is better," Khadija Aslam told IRIN. "We are very poor people. My husband makes carpets and we cannot afford an education for my children," she said, as her six-year-old daughter, Mahvish, tugged her arm. It was Mahvish's first time at a school. "Do you like the school?" Ya'qub asked her. "Yes," she said, vigorously nodding her head. Only two lanes away, in a small, decrepit tiny house, a half-woven carpet was stretched on a loom as its weaver and her daughter had gone to pick vegetables in a nearby farm for a meagre daily wage. A 10-year-old girl was housekeeping and baby sitting for a three-year-old sibling. "I have never been to school," Misbah, told IRIN. Her younger sister, Shumaila, is the only child from the household attending a school. "I help my mother in making this," Misbah said pointing to the half-woven carpet, which may fetch hundreds of dollars abroad, but only provides the family of five with subsistence living.