INDICATORS FOR CHILDREN'S RIGHTS

ZIMBABWE COUNTRY CASE STUDY

INVIOLATA CHINYANGARA, ISRAEL CHOKUWENGA, ROSELYN G. DETE, LINDA DUBE, JOSHUA KEMBO, PRECIOUS MOYO & RATIDZAI SHARON NKOMO

3. Social and economic deprivation

According to the Protocol document this chapter should concentrate on the two related areas of social security and economic exploitation. However, the data on social security provision for children are scant and not children centred and there has been no study linking the effects of recession and structural adjustment directly to the economic situation of children. In view of this, the chapter concentrates on one manifestation of social and economic deprivation - the economic exploitation of children - which itself shows some interesting characteristics in terms of the way the data are constructed. This section of the report thus examines the data available on the subject of child exploitation, which basically includes child labourers and other similar categories such as `street children'.

The data presented and commented on in this chapter were correspond to Articles on social and economic deprivation found in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which are: 4, 26, 32 to 34. These Articles are basically protection rights, and advocate for protection to be accorded to disadvantaged children. Similar Articles can be found in the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child: 5, 11, 15, 17, 19, 21, and 27.

Contradictions in Zimbabwean legislation

The Legal Age of Majority Act (No.15 of 1982) lays down in section 3 (1),(2) and (3) that:

The Act does not define what is meant by the legal age of majority. It seems the concept means having full legal capacity and full legal independence. The legal age of majority seems to involve not only the capacity to sue in one's own name and right and to contract and marry without the consent of the parent(s), but also the capacity to own and administer property. There is no reason why the Act should not apply after marriage (bearing in mind that the age of consent in Zimbabwe is 16 years and above, although it is being amended to 18 years) in circumstances where, but for the Legal Age of Majority Act, the wife would have fallen under her husband's guardianship and continue to be regarded as a minor, without rights to property.

With respect to child labour the Labour Relations Act has nothing to offer by way of protecting children aged over 16 yet, as we have seen, children below the age of 18 cannot enter into contracts. The Labour Relations Act states that any child who has worked is entitled to remuneration and it tends to enforce the contract entered into by the child and the employer irrespective of whether the contract is written or verbal agreement. Amendments to the Labour Relations Act (1985) known as The Labour Relations (Employment of Children and Young Persons) Regulations gazetted by the Minister of Public Service, Labour, and Social Welfare on Friday March, 1997, ban:

The light work permitted to children aged 12 to 18 years is defined as work that is not likely to prejudice the education, health, safety, rest or social, physical and mental development of the child.

Article 1 of The ILO Convention No. 138 on Minimum Age for Admission to Employment (1973) encourages states to both develop policies for abolishing child labour and child exploitation and progressively raise the minimum ages at which children can legally begin to work. In Article 2, Convention 138 goes beyond the general requirements by setting benchmarks for states to adhere to which are:

An editorial comment to the local daily The Herald of March 18, 1997 argued:

One of the most important current challenges is to monitor how effectively the law deals with child labour and this includes even dealing with the various contradictions that exist in the national laws.

Literature on the economic exploitation of children in Zimbabwe

In Zimbabwe the subject of economic exploitation of children is very recent and there is therefore a serious dearth of literature. The main body of literature consists of pioneer texts by Rene Loewenson (1989 & 1992), Loyd Sachikonye (1989) and Pamela Reynolds (1985) focusing on child labour, some texts on particular sectors, such as domestic workers, but more frequently on street children, an issue that has dominated the 1990s, in work by the Zimbabwe Council for the Welfare of Children, (1989), Backson Muchini & Sally Nyandiya-Bundy (1991), Michael Bourdillon (1991, 1993, 1994, 1995) and Linda Dube (1996, 1997). The research by Loewenson and Sachikonye was commissioned by the Government of Zimbabwe, the International Labour Office (ILO) and UNICEF. The study by Muchini and Nyandiya-Bundy was carried out for UNICEF, while the Zimbabwe Council for the Welfare of Children is an institution specialising in policy and advocacy. The remainder are independent, academic studies, although they have contributed to policy debates and advocacy.

All these studies are surveys based on small samples of limited geographic coverage. The most commonly-used tool for collecting information within a survey is the questionnaire, which is at best a poor method when used alone, at worst a bad tool to use with children, even though this is what is usually expected by those who commission research and often all that is possible within the time frame allowed for research. The exception is the academic study, Dance Civet Cat, by Pamela Reynolds, which is based on a variety of locally-based, detailed research methods that are described and evaluated in the text. In all this research the only nationwide survey was the one conducted by Muchini and Nyandiya Bundy (1991). As Bourdillon has commented with particular reference to the survey by Muchini and Nyandiya-Bundy, there are problems with a survey of this magnitude:

Limitations of the survey questionnaire method as a research tool include:

Other researchers rely on single-method studies, often anecdotes that are passed off as case studies. Information gathered is seldom cross-checked by using other methods, or by comparison with other similar studies and secondary data nor building upon that data . The end result is that most studies tend to be similar and do not show any meaningful progress in the development of the discourse.

Assumptions about and expectations of children

 

In data, debates and discussions on child-labour there is a general assumption that children are exploited only by their employers. Yet it is becoming evident that some children are exploited by their parents even though it is usually assumed that parents always have the best interest of their children at heart and thus the idea that they might exploit them is culturally unacceptable.

The data on child-exploitation tend to reflect protective attitudes towards children and to emphasise the harmful effects of child labour. This implies that there is nothing useful about children's work. We would suggest that it is necessary to find out what the children think about their work, about whether we can change child labour into child work. Indeed some recent studies have shown the value of children's contribution to their own lives and the lives of their family members. There are less pronounced inferences on the discourse about the meanings and changes in the conceptualisation of childhood as they relate to child work. Society expects at all times to find children at home, in school or in protected play grounds. They are not supposed to work or labour. Furthermore, there is an assumption in Zimbabwe among government officials that there is no child without a home and loving parents, or who cannot be cared for in times of difficulty by the extended family (see Bourdillon, 1991:2-3).

The data on child exploitation emanating from government sources are often collected under the theme of what UNICEF has been calling until recently `Children in Especially Difficult Circumstances', even more commonly known by the acronym CEDC. The list of CEDC in Zimbabwe includes child labourers (often with reference to children working in farms, the urban informal sector and in mines), children working in domestic environments, and to `street children'. The term child labour, is used, but not defined within the Zimbabwean context. The Report of the Government of Zimbabwe (1996) to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child used the words `child exploitation' but fell short of defining what the term meant. Definition of these phenomena would leads to the establishment of parameters of what is to be covered within the data that are collected.

Zimbabwean perceptions of child economic exploitation

When we were mapping information about economic exploitation we found an overall concern about where it takes place. It is implicit that some of the groups of children about whom concern is expressed are the focus of interest because of their high visibility within cities. Urban areas are of course centers of attraction, and ideas and debates within a nation tend to come through the city before they permeate into the remote rural and farming areas. Street children are generally perceived at best as a nuisance at worst as delinquents. They are looked upon as children who pollute the streets, who flagrantly violate the law and therefore need to be locked away. The perception by public officials and authorities is that street children paint a bad image of our cities (see Dube, forthcoming) When it comes to child-labourers, public officials and authorities are concerned, but nothing concrete is being done. Child labourers are often far out of sight (and out of mind) in domestic employment and in the remote commercial farms (see Dube, 1997).

In Chapter 1 we gave a description of the place of children in the traditional African contexts. These cultural attitudes have an impact on the ways in which child-labour and child exploitation are conceived and perceived. When looking at street children for example, government officials are very fond of pointing out that, according to African culture and custom, no children would be roaming the streets because they do not have parents. They argue that the extended family is always present to care for orphans (see Bourdillon, 1991:2-3). Proponents of such African culture arguments go further to say that no child would run away from home because of overwork or parental abuse. Such ideas are unthinkable. Even being whipped is considered good for the socialisation of children, as it is believed that children will thus learn to appreciate authority. When we interviewed Members of Parliament in the course of research for this Report some recited tales of how they worked hard in their own childhood, something which they considered socialises children into acquiring an appropriate work ethic and appreciating the value of the `dignity of labour'. We would suggest that this is a defensive approach to the issue of child labour and child exploitation. Such conceptualisation assumes that, in the African understanding of childhood, work by children is the norm and has never been seen as exploitative. There is an over-emphasis on the contribution of the child to the household economy, which fails to realise and accept that conditions of life, socio-economic and political structures have changed.

Some public officials have claimed that debate about child labour and child exploitation in Zimbabwe is an imported debate, from ideas imported from the Wes. Such sentiments buttress the view that concepts of child labour and child exploitation are seemingly alien to the African context. However, there is a problem with the Western reaction to child labour as it seems not to acknowledge the contribution of child to the household economy. Quite often child labour is looked upon as if there were no positive benefits to the child. Such a view definitely has a problem in the African setting since it is derived from the idealised Western middle class family, which is implicit in international documents such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The problem is not that child labour and child exploitation do not exist, but how we can define what we want to deal with in a way that is acceptable to all those who are concerned and come from different cultural backgrounds.

Data on economic exploitation

As we have noted above, the subjects of child labour and the economic exploitation of children are still very recent and very little literature exists. Apart from the few works and publications on the subject, the data are neither readily available nor accessible. As we noted in the list above the data that are currently available mainly come from scholarly works or studies carried out for an external donor agency, a government department, or a research institute. Reliable statistical information is non-existent in some sectors of child exploitation. Frequently- quoted `statistics' are mostly guesstimates, as in the case of street children who for most of the 1990s have been stated to be 12,000 nation-wide and `increasing' without any change in this symbolic figure.

One of the major problems highlighted in studying child-exploitation is that it is difficult to gain access to children in their situations of work, especially with reference to children in farms and domestic environments. The children in these two sectors are working within private environments and the owners of the properties often restrict the entry of people they are suspicious of, such as researchers. Hence the data that are available are limited to small case studies rather than providing quantitative aspects of the phenomenon.

Although some scholars have tried to pay attention to socio-cultural context prevailing in the areas from which they have gathered their data, otherwise they are silent on these issues. The data usually concern themselves with trying to quantify the problem, which unfortunately is done through using small samples confined to a particular area and impossible to generalise to the whole country.

Nevertheless, we found that nationwide data are available from the 1992 Census Data in the Central Statistical Office. It simply had to be re-calculated to show the aspects of child work in which we were interested for this Report. It is surprising therefore that studies of child labour always assume that a special survey has to take place, when data are already available. Data re-calculated from the 1992 Census gives a universal picture of the extent of children's economic activities in Zimbabwe, even though it tends to concentrate on the formal sector of employment. Nevertheless, from the children's rights monitoring perspective, these recalculations are particularly useful because they can be disaggregated by gender, by province and by economic sector.

It is also possible to recalculate the statistics in the Census to provide age-groupings that correspond to one basic requirement for monitoring both the Convention and the Charter. In Census data as a whole, the population figures are normally provided in five year age intervals: 0-5 years, 6-10 years, 11-15 years, 16 to 20 and so on. As both the Convention and the Charter define children as the population under 18 years of age monitoring system require data on this group. Yet most figures for 'children' relate to persons under 15 years of age. Data provided about this group lack information about persons aged 16 to 18 years. With respect to data on child employment this is exacerbated by the main international instrument on child labour, Convention 138 of International Labour Office (ILO), which sets the minimum age for employment at 15 years. Thus, for the 1992 Census, measurement of child employment referred only to children under 15 years old. However, we were able to calculate the figures for children aged 18 years and below. These, particularly when combined with the disaggregations mentioned above, provided some interesting data.

The recalculation of the 1992 Census data to show the employment of persons under 18 years of age, when disaggregated by province shows, for example, that child labour was highest in Midlands Province ( 24%) and Harare, and lowest in Bulawayo, at less than 2 %. Other provinces account for around 10% each, with the exception of Matabeleland South at around 5%. Gender comparisons show that, in the largely rural provinces of the country, girl children are almost twice as likely as boys to be engaged in work. This is most apparent in Masvingo Province. The situation in urban areas, especially Harare and Bulawayo, is very different, with boys and girls participating in the labour force to almost the same extent. The exception to this pattern is once again Matabeleland South, where working boys significantly outnumber working girls.

In order to get more insight into the extent of child labour we examined these recalculations of the 1992 Census data according to the dominant economic sectors in Zimbabwe. We found that the data indicated that rural (communal and resettlement) areas of smaller-scale farming, accounted for the majority of children's employment in the country, 91.03 %. Within this sector, girl children slightly exceeded the boys ( 58.25% and 41.75% respectively). Child work in the commercial farms contributed 3.78% of the total child labour force, while urban employment accounted for 3.60 % . It is quite common in Zimbabwe to find children working on commercial farms, picking cotton and tea for example, before going to school, if they go to school at all.

The potential of existing official statistics for monitoring some forms of child employment is considerable, yet these figures have not thus far been exploited. It is also worth noting that the potential for correlating data on child employment and education could be usefully explored. Date exist on school drop out, but are not related in the statistical record to the recruitment of children into exploitative work situations, even though this connection is often made anecdotally. The exception is certain data relating to commercial farms that do look at the rates of enrolment in farm schools in comparison with other sectors, with respect to the rate of school drop out. In other situations, as in the analysis of data on street children, one occasionally finds information about the impact of housing conditions on children's tendency to leave home, yet these data are not systematically collected.

Links with other regroupings

The analysis of the overall spread of data collected for this Report led the Country Case Study Team to make broad assessments of the links that could usefully be made between data sets in order to produce an integrated monitoring system. The area in which we found most potential for this was the focus on child employment, which can be clearly related to information on education as well as children-parent relations. The former link is not surprising. Literature on child labour points to a close relationship between the two. Education is said to 'produce' child labour through:

In the data we examined from Zimbabwe, there was indeed a correlation between child work/labour and the provision of education. Low school enrolments seem to result in high incidents of child exploitation or child labourers. The following patterns emerged when comparing data on education and the incidence of child labour:

We also found, as pointed out in the previous chapter that it is important to consider a number of factors in children-parent relationships with respect to child work/labour. Quality of housing is one element to be considered, but cultural influences on the nature of authority relationships within families and households, as outlined in Chapter 1, are also vital. Parents use their authority to make all sorts of decisions that affect their children and to issue commands which children are expected to obey. Sometimes parents can use their customary role expected of them to re-emphasise their authority in the family. If the children dare cross the parents' paths they have no one to turn to, especially within the urban setting. As a result when this occurs children might seek refuge on the streets. Reconstituted families and step-parenthood are also important influences. Some step parents (male and female) ill-treat the child or children of their partners, possibly because of insecurity. The abused children might take to the streets, even living there at night. Girls living under a male step parent are often vulnerable to sexual abuse (Dube, forthcoming 1997).

Comments

From the scant data available it is very clear that the subject of economic exploitation of children still remains to be comprehensively researched. Even what is meant by the term economic exploitation of children in Zimbabwe has not been established. Yet data exist in current nationwide data sets that might be usefully calculated on a general basis in order to monitor child employment regularly according to differences between different sectors and provinces, as well as by gender. In addition, potential correlations between data sets from different ministries could be explored.

[Back to Index] [Go to Chapter 4]