Inequalities in South Africa: Child Labour
Causes of Child Labour in South Africa
One in four children…
Of the 14 million kids aged
over 5 in South Africa, about 3,5 million of them (one in four) are engaged in
some sort of labour. Most of them are in fact working in construction and
mining which means that they’re often separated from their rural families (one
in three children).
Then, another 30% of them
live only one parent, for two reasons:
- The other one has died from the consequences of HIV/AIDS;
- The other parent has had to relocate to find work elsewhere.
The outcome of this
situation is that single-parent families are much poorer as only one adult’s
salary isn’t enough to feed everyone at home. Hence the desperate need to send
your children to work. Banning child labour in this case will do more harm than
good to the family. What is needed is a much more complex solution: reducing
poverty, improving job opportunities and increasing salaries altogether.
The impact of inequalities
South Africa is one of the
most unequal societies you can find, featuring some of the largest income gaps
between the rich and the poor worldwide. This gap has one common implication:
it creates a demand for house workers for the super-rich who need all kinds of
services to maintain their possessions (house, pool, garden, and whatnot).
Domestic workers are close to representing 10% of the working population in the
country and are generally underpaid.
So what’s the role of kids
in this? Well girls are very much in demand for this type of job, which means
it’s a good way for parents to earn money if it’s easier for girls to find a
job. Which means their education will often be sacrificed. Ironically, recent
statistics have shown that girls tend to stick to school longer and perform
better… when given the opportunity. A growing threat to the well-being of South
African girls is also the increase in sexual violence and sex trafficking.
Free education… in theory
Finally, the country’s
educational policy is another problem to add to the causes of child labour in
South Africa. In theory, education should be free and compulsory for all
children up to 15 years old. However, what happens in reality is widely
different. The system works like this: poor families don’t get to pay for
anything and those who can pay will pay.
Sounds fair in theory, but
in practice schools rarely allow poor families not to pay the fees. One
other issue is the “tradition” of poor education and schooling that the black
population was offered during the apartheid. As second rate citizens, the government didn’t really care about them
for over 40 years and provided very limited schooling opportunities in
overcrowded classrooms, poor quality of classes and no incentive whatsoever to
finish their basic education.
Needless to say, these impoverished schools aimed at the rural population
were boasting the highest dropout rates in South Africa. Nothing was made to
try and adapt to the poor’s needs and particular lifestyle: as farmers, they
had to make sure they were in the fields at key periods of the year. But the
schools would nonetheless keep on working on a nationwide system – providing
classes and exams at times that didn’t suit the local population at all.
A tradition of exclusion
This ended in the early 1990s but you can see how an entire tradition of white dominance (politically and economically) can have a huge impact even today on how schools and the system usually function. Nowadays the black still suffer from living in overcrowded areas after having been relocated as “surplus people” into slums for decades and decades.Just the way we often say old habits die hard, the same is true of the way the country got used to providing its black population substandard services. Things are changing it’s true, but still very slowly. But unemployment remains a serious threat to education and child labour in South Africa. Offering black South Africans real economic opportunities to break with the poverty cycle is the most effective way to fight child labour and social exclusion
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