In fact, Afghanistan has never been kind to its children and women and it has been the cruelest country for them indeed. Perhaps, whenever the war breaks out in any part of the world, it affects the children and women the most as it affected the children and women in the last decades of continuous war with worst ever bloodshed in Afghanistan.
Conceivably, the children in the world at large are considered the driver for every change and revolution, but in Afghanistan, they are considered the best suited generation for every hard and unjust work. According to reports, more than 50% of the population of 24 million people is under the age of 18. UNICEF estimates that up to 30% of the primary school age children are working and are often the only breadwinner for their families.
At the same time, a survey done by the UN that 56 percent of the brick makers in Afghan kilns are the children who are under the age of 18 and 47 percent are 14 and even younger. Due to extreme poverty and ever ending debt, these children feel that they have to use all available labour, even if it is to their long-term harm to provide food to their family members. Most of these children belong to the families whose parents are illiterate, drug addict or died during the war or they are handicapped.
In the same way, social norms and other culture barriers prevented women from leaving their homes for the daily available labour. Despite several years of intervention on women rights, it is still not culturally acceptable for women to work outside of their homes, and if a woman has been widowed or her husband is unable to work due to injury or illness, support of the family falls to other male relatives. When there is no extended family support or it is insufficient to support a large family, children become the only breadwinners in seeking for the sake of their family's survival.
Additionally, the other cause for the child labour is lack of industrial infrastructure, generally associated with the child labour in the manufacturing sectors. 21 percent of child workers are employed in shops, 13 percent work as street vendors. Others work in vehicle repairing, metal workshops, tailoring or farming or livestock. In Kabul and other main large cities, there are street children who shine shoes, collect and sell scrap metal, paper, firewood or begging on the streets, from early morning until midnight. Due to extreme economic pressure and other domestic problems, over 3 million children are being denied from getting education and other social rights in Afghanistan.
Likewise, education is believed to be the core pillar to human development in every aspect of life. Education is considered the sole right of a child throughout the world but badly denied in Afghanistan. Article 28 of the convention on the rights of children indicates that states recognize the right of child to education and with a view to achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they shall in particular focus on:
• Providing the primary education compulsory and making sure that every child has access to it in all level
• Appreciating and supporting the development process of different forms of secondary education, including general and vocational education, making them available and accessible to every child and taking appropriate steps, such as the introduction of free education and offering financial assistance in case someone can't afford it
• Preparing the ground to education for all on the basis of capacity by every appropriate means to make sure that all have access to quality education
• Developing best suited teaching curricula and making educational and vocational information available to all students equally with no discrimination on the basis of color, religion and background
• Creating child enabling committees to decrease the rate of drop-out and increase the enrollment of girls and boys by convincing those parents who enforce their children into farms, livestock and other available labour
Following the above mentioned bulletins, Afghanistan has signed the convention in 1994 and has a bold history of support in education sectors. The 1994 Afghan constitution mandated education. For women in particular, education was stressed under the communist regime installed by the Soviet Union after 1979. But a backlash against the modernism communist party's curriculum resulted in falling education levels for both boys and girls during the civil war, since 1992-1996 but with worst consequences and destruction under the rule of the Taliban.
It is not that the government didn't make effort to reduce child labour and provide education for them in the last ten years. The Afghan government and its international coalition have long time back begun programs to widen the educational opportunities for all children in every part of the country, with particular focus on most marginalized and poor families.
In order to strengthen the level of education, the department of labour reported that the Japanese government has allocated a $4 million fund project in 2009 to provide literacy and other vocational courses to street worker children, including other most excluded, and poor ones who can't afford to return to their classes. This was believed to reduce the rate of child labour and enable them find some best suited job through these courses.
Objectively speaking, all the efforts by international partners in protecting the rights of children and women went a day dream. The fund being raised on education sectors for the marginalized and most excluded families have all went by. Those who had the rule of implementation did not fulfill their obligation as it was expected. The government did not make tangible efforts to implement these funds properly as they were supposed to. As a result, the children are still on the street, asking for khairat or cleaning the cars to get 1 or 2 AFNs with which they are supposed to support their family members. Instead, the child labour and street children has increased.
As of now, if poverty is the main factor in contributing to child labor and other problems, rampant insecurity situation and corruption throughout the country is a close second or even the most concerning issue. Currently, lack of security and increasing rate of corruption remained the greatest challenges to the enjoyment of human rights in Afghanistan, particularly for the children and women.
Insecurity in rural areas has plunged school enrollment numbers to zero in some villages. NGOs working on the ground for the welfare of children, women rights, child rights protection, particularly UN, Safe the Children and ActionAid are facing insecurity challenges. Their operation in these fields became limited.
The communities with whom they were working to enable claim their rights, protecting the rights of children; increase the enrollment of both boys and girls and supporting the youth to for change all became so conservative than previous years with the presence of national and international NGOs. Most of the families don't even allow their children to the child centers and other educational institutions due to insecurity threat.
Corruption, poverty and insecurity have long prevented generation of Afghans from becoming educated. If the education is the key to breaking out of the cycle of poverty, than child labour threatens the Afghan economic growth and human development. The goals set by the Afghanistan compact seem lofty. Investment on education, security and social services on the grand scale is required in order to ensure an inclusive education system and an end to the child labour in the region.
Above all, the issue of child labour is at its core an economic problem that requires economic panaceas. We need to strengthen our efforts with the government and other national and international NGOs to find some holistic responses to this phenomenon.
As per the current ground challenges, the government and other both national and international institutions working in Afghanistan on child rights protection, women rights, including other main sectors must all come together as a force to provide short-term humanitarian aid for the immediate relief to bonded families and long-term programs to help them transit to more sustainable livelihoods and break the inter-generational cycle of this chained child labour.