The ECLT Foundation works directly with communities in 6 countries.
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“The stakes for children, our sole beneficiaries, their families and their communities are dangerously high,” said Hammond, ECLT Executive Director. “Individuals who have never worked or spent significant time in rural communities facing child labour issues do not take the realities faced by children living in poverty into consideration.”
The ECLT Foundation welcomes the recent report by Human Rights Watch, A Bitter Harvest, which highlights concerns of child labour and occupational safety in tobacco growing in Zimbabwe, where “tobacco is the country’s most valuable export commodity.”
Today, the ILO estimates that 152 million children are in child labour. Overall, 71 percent of these children are working in agriculture, most them doing unpaid work with their families. The ILO statistics provide an important standard, but it is important to know more about child labour to understand the possible limitations of these numbers.
These young people have the right to work in conditions that are safe and healthy. The ECLT Foundation promotes decent work in rural communities where tobacco is grown through close cooperation with farmers, labour inspectors and community leaders.
The ECLT Foundation is proud to work with our partners on the ground in Malawi to ensure that children in tobacco-growing communities have better access to education. Building and renovating schools is one way to help families make the choice to send their children to school instead of to wok in the fields.
The decision made by the ILO Governing Body will have significant impact on children in communities in all the 124 countries around the world where tobacco is grown.
Through our REALISE project in Uganda, the ECLT Foundation worked to ensure that families could send their children to school and not to work in the fields. From 2013 to 2017, ECLT worked with our implementing partners, UWESO, to reach children from over 18,000 households in the Hoima district.
The International Labour Office of the ILO has released its “integrated ILO strategy to address decent work deficits in the tobacco sector,” which will be presented at the Governing Body session in March 2018.
Malawi is the country where the ECLT Foundation started our project work on the ground, working to fight the root causes of child labour in rural communities where tobacco is grown.
