World Learning Commemorates World Day Against Child Labor 2009

Photo by Azra Kacapor

This year’s theme, “Give Girls a Chance: End Child Labor”

Today World Learning issued the following statement in commemoration of World Day Against Child Labor and the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the International Labour Organization Convention No. 182, which addresses the urgent need to work toward the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor:

By commemorating the tenth anniversary of this historic international agreement in defense of children’s rights, World Learning celebrates the substantial progress made toward the convention’s critical goals while recognizing the tremendous challenges that remain. This year’s theme, “Give Girls a Chance: End Child Labor,” resonates deeply with our development priorities and approach. World Learning is committed to the removal of all children from hazardous work environments and recognizes the unique systemic threats that exist for girls who are exploited for their labor.

Photo by Azra Kacapor

Across the world, an estimated 62 million girls are out of school and 100 million girls are involved in child labor. Poverty and lack of education too often force girls into some of the worst forms of child labor, often in hidden, unhealthy, and dangerous work situations. In many countries, girls’ labor is deeply entrenched in cultural practices and gender norms and takes place behind closed doors, removed from public scrutiny and concern.

World Learning’s approach to the elimination of child labor focuses on increasing access to quality and equitable education. Our work is broadly designed to address the worst forms of child labor, with a key focus on reaching those children involved in invisible forms of labor and ensuring they have access to quality schools. Through projects in Angola, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Peru and Guatemala, World Learning works with parent-teacher associations, Ministries of Education, and Girls’ Education Advisory Committees (GEACs) to ensure girls’ access, retention, and performance in schools. To address social barriers to girls’ education, World Learning’s programs help establish the school as the locus of community resources and influence. Through schools, community partners can unite and mobilize to tackle gender bias and protect girls from exploitation within their communities.
For examples of World Learning’s work combating child labor through education, see a video from our Wiñari project in Ecuador, entitled “Erika’s Story.” Also see a video from our USAID-funded CASCAID project in Ethiopia about a girl orphaned by HIV/AIDS who’s been given a chance to stay in school.

World Learning believes that educating girls is the single best investment that can be made to combat child labor and tackle the root causes of poverty. Our community partners daily witness the transformative power of girls’ education on the wellbeing of their communities when young women who have received education go on to reinvest in their children and their communities. More resources need to be mobilized to improve the quality of education for disadvantaged girls and boys. This investment will pay global dividends for generations to come.

Read more about World Learning International Development Projects.

Comparative International Education Society Conference

Charleston, SC, March 22 – March 26th, 2009

By Jen Durben, Programs Officer, Child and Youth Programs, World Learning

 This week, World Learning’s Child and Youth team are attending the Comparative International Education Society Conference, in Charleston, SC.  Members from the Child and Youth team are giving presentations based upon our work in Ecuador and Ethiopia.  On Sunday, March 22, Azra Kacapor, Director of Child and Youth Programs presented at a panel addressing the Preservation and Promotion of Indigenous Communities in Latin America: Politics, Language and Policy.  The panelist discussed issues of bilingual and indigenous education in Central and South America.  Azra discussed World Learning’s work with indigenous children in Ecuador who are involved in hazardous child labor. World Learning’s presentation was distinguished as the practitioner perspective among panelists representing different universities in the US including Michigan State, Vanderbilt, University of South Carolina, and Pacific Lutheran Universities.

On the second day of the CIES conference, Maria Gloria Barreiro and Maury Mendenhall presented on two different panels, each of which generated stimulating discussion.  Each of World Learning’s six participants have split off to maximize experience and networking capability.  Several conference participants from other organizations have remarked upon World Learning’s impressive level of visibility and level of professionalism at this year’s CIES conference. In addition, World Learning’s exhibitor table moved into a high-traffic area where many conference participants have stopped by to engage in conversation and to collect informational materials, as well as promotional materials.

World Day Against Child Labor 2008 – Education: The right response to child labor

World Learning joins the international community in supporting World Day Against Child Labor (WDACL), an annual event hosted by the International Labor Organization (ILO). This year’s theme, Education: The Right Response to Child Labor, strikes at the core of World Learning’s work in removing children from the worst forms of child labor. There are an estimated 165 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 who are involved in child labor, often working long hours in hazardous conditions. For these 165 million children, the answer to their future is access to adequate education.

World Learning has a long history of combating child labor through education. Our projects aim to provide children with access to quality and relevant education as a means to remove them from the worst forms of child labor. Maria Gloria Barreiro, Project Director for Wiñari, World Learning’s Child Labor project in Ecuador, stresses the importance of education in combating child labor: “providing children with accelerated education programs, like what we are doing in Ecuador, is what keeps them in school, providing new opportunities for out of school and overage children and eventually pulling their families out of the cycle of poverty.”

Azra Kacapor, World Learning’s Director for Children and Youth Programs, says that “the key to breaking the cycle of poverty is to create opportunities through quality education for relevant and contextualized economic empowerment and job skills training for children and youth.” World Learning’s Wiñari project in Ecuador makes the link between education, economic empowerment, and life skills training by providing indigenous youth with specialized agro-technical high school programs. To date, World Learning has removed over 3,000 children in Ecuador from child labor situations by enrolling them in specially designed education programs.

Read more about Wiñari and World Learning’s other Children and Youth Programs here, or read a series of recent posts on Wiñari from World Learning NOW.

Where bottom-up meets top-down

In the world of development and social change, “top-down” = bad. It tends to suggest expensive solutions imposed on communities by government agencies or others with little regard for or involvement of local knowledge and input. Invoking bottom-up, grassroots, or community-driven approaches is, across the non-profit sector, a surefire way to garner consensus and make friends. But is it top-down always wrong, and is bottom-up ever sufficient?

As I leave Ecuador, World Learning´s Winari staff are assembling a series of workshops with Ecuador´s national child labor agency. The goal of these workshops is to transfer Winari´s knowledge, methodology,and lessons to the agency with long-term responsibility for eradicating child labor in the country. Winari, like every such intervention, is a short-term engagement (four years, in this case). When the time comes for the project to pull up stakes, they need to ensure that the baton is passed on effectively, that there is capacity and commitment at every level to continue and build on the success of the project to date – in effect, institutionalizing successful models so they become the new norms.

And so, Winari has to work it from every angle. From individual schools to communities, parents, teachers, indigenous organizations, national agencies, the private sector, and government – a project like Winari must build capacity at every level of society to inherit and sustain the models that effect change. It´s not enough to develop specialized curricula if there isn´t sufficient funding to hire teachers and train them properly to deliver it. It´s not enough to help more of these students obtain a secondary education if there´s not the economic development to provide them jobs when they graduate.

It seems to me (IMHO as a non-development-professional), this is where bottom-up meets top-down and it´s also where the rubber meets the road for true social change. And this is, I think, the sweet spot where World Learning does its very best work. Whether the focus is children, HIV/AIDS or some other global challenge, our approach is to build capacity and enhance civil society to carry the weight of change forward.

Bill Drayton of Ashoka recently described social entrepreneurs this way (paraphrasing): Social entrepreneurs aren´t satisfied giving people fish or even teaching them to fish. Social entrepreneurs won´t rest till they´ve overhauled the entire fishing industry. I think that´s what Winari´s doing here in Ecuador and what our development projects are doing the world over. And I can tell you one thing from watching it happen on the ground this past week: It´s hard work.

Teach your teachers well

Apologies to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, but we all know you can’t teach your children well if you don’t teach your teachers well first. The proverbial apple never falls far from its tree. The Winari project in Ecuador recognizes this basic reality, as it works its way up the chain of change from students to teachers to parents and beyond. That’s why Friday they organized one of several 2-day workshops for 60 or so tutors who work in Winari’s after-school program. One fact that’s important to know: in Ecuador the school day for primary school kids ends at noon. For kids pressed into child labor, that means even if they do go to school for the morning, they might still end up working 5 hours at home or in the field or on the street before dinnertime rolls around.

To address this concern, Winari developed an after-school program that serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, it helps develop students’ non-academic skills by introducing art, drama, music, dance, and plenty of good old-fashioned play. On the other hand, it fills an afternoon with child-centered activities that might otherwise be taken over by far too many hours of hard, adult labor.

The tutor session was great fun, I have to say. Participants, mostly school teachers, came from the area of Cotopaxi in Ecuador’s sierra. They ranged widely in age from 23 or so to 50+. Some wore the beautiful traditional dress of the Cotopaxi Kichwa while other young men and women sported the latest urban fashion. For me, it presented a wonderful snapshot of modern Ecuador in one room. Teambuilding exercises, including a rather wild congo line, broke the ice, kept everyone awake, and modeled the kind of playful approach they want tutors to take with their kids in the after-school program.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. The facilitator really pushed the teachers on their own capacity to teach and mentor the kids in their charge. “How many of you read a book a month?” he asked the group. No hands raised. “A book every two months?” No hands raised. He paused and then asked, “How do you expect your students to read when you don’t?” He went on to ask about how much these teachers write, and how well they listen. His point hit home: we can’t ask more of our children than we ask of ourselves and our institutions.

My Ecuadorian school visit schtick

So I’ve been in Ecuador just 3 days and have visited 5 schools. I think I now have my school visit schtick officially down. I’ve given 6 or so speeches, in one case with a microphone to the entire class of some 200 kids (in my lame Spanish). Interestingly, no one laughed at my jokes but they laughed at other things I said. Hmm. The littlest kids are entranced by my camera of course and gather round to see my pictures. Once today I got rushed so hard by a mob of first graders jockeying for the best view that they almost knocked me backwards off the bench! Let’s see, oh yeah, one 6-year-old girl inexplicably tried to tickle me under my chin. No worries. Then I danced a traditional Kichwa dance with a 7-year-old girl in front of a delighted crowd. One class asked me to sing, but I decided to hold onto my last shred of self-respect and had them sing me a song instead. If I’d known what to expect, I would have choreographed something elaborate, special effects, the whole shebang. Instead I just wing it and smile a lot and it seems to work fine! (or so I think….)

Growing new futures in the Amazon

Got picked up early this morning by Camilo Grefa, the Winari project’s regional coordinator for the Amazon. As I mentioned yesterday, I was whisked thousands of feet down from Quito by plane to visit some schools in the Amazon. I think I’m starting to get the bends from all the altitude shifts. This region of the Amazon is mainly home to Kichwa people, though there are also Huarani dozens of other indigenous groups. We drive an hour west to the town of Loreto, a community of mostly subsistence farmers growing yuca, bananas, guava, pineapple, and other fruits. Here, many children are held out of school to help work the fields. And, given all the insect life of the Amazon, chemical fertilizers are sprayed in abundance. I passed one boy on the road who couldn’t have been more than 12 with a tank of fertilizer on his back and a sprayer in his hand. Not a pretty sight.

We visit the Colegio Avila, a vocational high school that’s helping keep kids in school at a critical age where, for so many, education ends abruptly. At this school, students not only study their standard subjects in the classroom, but they also learn about agricultural science in the living laboratory that sits just outside the school walls. We stop in a classroom where I am forced to make a speech to students in my broken Spanish. The kids clearly get a good laugh out of it and it no doubt boosts their confidence in their own language skills (whatever works!). Then we head into the fields with students as our guides and teachers.

Leonora, a 17-year-old girl who lives in Loreto with 10 brothers and sisters, takes me to the greenhouse, where tomato seedlings are growing. Then we head to a cacao garden where another student explains the entire life cycle of that glorious plant. When I ask about fertilizers, she explains all the natural methods they’ve learned that don’t require chemicals. Leonora tells me how she goes home and educates her parents on these same methods (see video of Leonora, in Spanish). From there we hit the onion patch, the pineapple field, the pig corral, the goat garden. At each stop, student becomes teacher and provides a lecture. It strikes me that these students have a maturity beyond their years. If exploited for labor, their maturity works against them, denying them a childhood and future all at once. But if harnessed for their own learning and empowerment, it’s an incredible asset.

So I think of the distance that separates the boy on the road, out of school working 8 hour days, spraying chemicals that each day shorten his life and compromise his health, and Leonora, in school studying with friends, gaining and sharing knowledge, and learning cutting-edge approaches to organic agriculture. Night…and day.

Vertical economies

The anthropologist, John Murra, many years back wrote about life in the Andes as a “vertical economy.” From before the days of the Inca empire through today people in Ecuador and other nations that straddle the spine of the Andes have moved fluidly from high mountain pastures to lowland fields, through cloud forest and rainforest, to make a living. Each zone, through a dizzying range of altitudes, had something to offer at different times of year and people moved through them or traded across them like we move through the aisles of supermarkets.

Times have obviously changed from this idyllic picture for most folks, but what hasn’t changed is the migration and movement of people up and down the Andes, east to west, west to east, to extract a living. Today it’s the ongoing Amazonian land grab, as one frontier town gives way to the next and more rainforest is cut down to make way for farms, towns, and oil fields. I’m thinking all this as I eat breakfast alongside uniformed oil company workers in the grim Amazonian frontier town of Coca. They’re all here from other parts, Quito or Guayaquil, to make a living from this industry that here in Ecuador has destroyed rainforest, driven indigenous tribes from their lands and in the past left behind enough toxic waste to cover an area the size of Rhode Island.

I recall some graffiti I saw on a wall in Quito yesterday that didn’t resonate then as it does now: “Con petroleo y el cobre, la gente mas pobre” (“With copper and oil, the people get poorer”…loses its poetry in translation).

Escuela Juan Diego

The key to the success of Winari is the way local communities and leaders were involved from the get-go in the design of the project. There’s no success without sustainability and there’s no sustainability if local people, in communities, don’t lead the charge. Today I had the privilege of meeting one of these leaders – Jose Cuichan, the director of the Escuela Juan Diego. To say this school is in Quito paints entirely the wrong picture. This school is on the mountain slopes on the far edge of Quito, a brutal hour and a half drive from the city center through nightmare traffic and even worse roads. Here, in the Barrio Tepeyac, some of the poorest migrants from the sierra have settled, building homes from whatever they can scavenge. Open sewers run alongside almost impassable rutted dirt roads. Dogs scavenge in garbage. It’s not a place you go for a quick dose of hope. But at the end of the road that’s exactly what you find.

The Escuela Juan Diego, with support from World Learning, is teaching almost 200 children, from 6 to 12 or so, and doing so much with so little. In one class children were singing a song in Quechua that they’d written themselves.

In another, a math lesson was underway. In another, older students are learning how to analyze texts and to create bibliographies. They’re in the church next to the school because the school is still under construction and can’t house all the kids. But the lack of the ideal schoolhouse isn’t slowing the learning.

I then met Oscar, a sharp 12-year-old, whose first year of school was last year. That’s right – until he was 11 school didn’t exist for him. He stayed home, worked in the house, helped the family, and saw no other possible future. He tells me now he LOVES math, which is a good thing since he wants to be a pilot, see other places, travel the world. You can tell that even if it’s a kid’s wild dream, it’s been well-researched and it’s propelling him forward. When you meet a kid like Oscar in a place like Barrio Tepeyac, anything seems possible.

Growing from the bottom

Phew. I arrived in Quito late last night and spent the day, among other things, adjusting to the altitude (2800 m, second highest capital in the world!). And just as I was beginning to adjust, I got on a plane late today and dropped back down into the green murk of the Amazon. As I write from my hotel there are captive hotel monkeys torturing each other outside. More on that later…

Today I got immersed in the wonderful Winari project, which World Learning leads in partnership with an Ecuadorean NGO, Desarollo y Autogestion (DyA). Winari is a word in the Quechua language, the primary language of the Ecuadorean highlands, which translates as “growing from the bottom” – a fitting way to describe so much of what we do. The goals of the project are to combat child labor, a common practice in indgenous communities, by opening new pathways to education for children and communities. My day started with a debrief by the Winari team, led by Maria Gloria Barreiro, our energetic program manager in Quito. Many indigenous children here don’t get a basic education because they are working 70+ hours a week to help support their families. For most, this means working in fields, or fincas as they’re called here, often using toxic fertilizers, handling machetes, or hauling wood and other materials too heavy for their small frames. In the city, it means selling goods on the street where they face a different set of risks. The reasons they don’t go to school are many, and of course poverty plays a heavy hand. But there are also attitudes toward children working in indigenous families that are deeply rooted in tradition. Most parents have little more than a primary school education and they don’t understand all the benefits that school can offer their children. Winari is working with local indigenous organizations to shift attitudes, educate communities, provide access to high-quality education, and abolish risks for these kids. So far they have had huge success, with almost 6,000 kids in school and learning who would otherwise be deprived of the opportunity.