There are in Morocco one million and a half to two million children either deprived of education, obliged to work or live in the streets. Alarming figures? Reality is even more alarming when these children's social situations, work conditions, and the effect of exploitation on them are considered.
Despite the efforts exerted to fight child labour in Morocco, precarious socio-economic conditions still push thousands of parents to integrate their children in work-place from a very early age, instead of sending them to school.
Faced with poverty, displacement due to rural exodus, and family instability, children find themselves unprotected and, in many cases, have either to work or go on the street.
Is work really the lesser harm?
Having never benefited from training, and being deprived of protection, working children are obliged to accept any kind of job, with very miserable wages.
Employers in some sectors prefer children because they constitute a mass of cheep and controllable labour. Up to 10,000 children aged 8-14 work in carpet weaving. As a pretext, their employers claim that they help them learn a skill that would enable them to earn their living in the future.
Worse, some children are exploited in rubbish dumps by local and international garbage-sorting companies, breaching all international human rights laws. For each kilogram they sort, kids are paid a miserable 20 centimes (MAD 1 equals 100 centimes). The selected items are then sold at MAD 2 a kilo to recycling companies.
Children do not even benefit from their own salaries, as the money always goes to parents. But financial exploitation is only one facet of their suffering.
The tasks children are given often exceed their physical capacity. Little girls, who most of the time work as housemaids, have very long working days. A study said that over 72 % of under-age housemaids wake up before 7 a.m, and that 65% do not get to sleep before 11 p.m.
These girls are also exposed to violence and sexual exploitations, and their consequences, including social exclusion, psychological traumas, and undesired maternity.
Overexploited boys on the other hand, are often faced with physically harsh duties. Boys are very often given hazardous and too heavy tasks which exceed by far their physical ability.
Working children are also deprived of social security. In the event of an accident, the child finds himself in the street, jobless, and without medical care.
Taking action
Many measures have been taken in Morocco to deal with this appalling phenomenon. A series of awareness campaigns was organised, in addition to many national programmes, including “Inqad”, which aims to combat under-age housemaids' employment, and “Adros”, a literacy programme for working children.
The government, which has declared June 12 as a national day for action against child labour, is currently cooperating with a number of NGOs to prepare a bill which will lift the minimum age of child labour from 15 to 18.
But more efforts are still needed to guarantee the implementation of such laws, avoid undeclared child labour cases, and deal with socio-economic problems, which are the root of this phenomenon.
Maybe then, Morocco, along with other countries, will reach the optimistic target expressed last month by the International Labour Organisation, which had noted with satisfaction the decline of child labour around the world, and stated that child labour could be eliminated in 10 years if the current decline continued.
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