Den økonomiske nedtur fortsætter i Zimbabwe og arbejdsløsheden bliver ved med at stige. Det får mange forældre til at sende deres børn på arbejde for at spæde til familiens samlede indkomst. Op mod 13 procent af landets børn udfører børnearbejde.
NORTON, 9 January 2014 (IRIN): The company closures, downsizings and retrenchments that have led to the demise of Zimbabwe’s manufacturing sector in the past decade, and particularly in recent months, are forcing parents and guardians to send their children out to work to augment household incomes, say labour experts and economists.
An assessment of the manufacturing sector’s performance by the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI), a membership organization that represents the industry, described the situation as “a crisis” and noted that many companies had downsized or closed their doors in 2012. A 2013 report by CZI found that businesses were operating at less than 40 percent of capacity.
The National Social Security Authority, a government body, estimates that between July 2011 and July 2013, 711 companies in the capital, Harare, went out of business, causing 8,336 workers to lose their jobs.
Virksomheder tvinges til at lukke
Chronic power shortages, a loss of markets and a lack of capital to invest in new technologies and machinery have been forcing businesses to scale back or close down in the last decade, but according to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), the rate of retrenchments increased in the second half of 2013.
This followed the general elections in August, when President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party won a landslide victory. A coalition government with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) that had helped stabilize the economy after a protracted period of political and economic instability, was dissolved.
“Children, together with women, are bearing the brunt of company closures that, according to findings by our retrenchment committee for the period from July 2013, have resulted in an average of 300 workers being laid off per week,” said Japhet Moyo, ZCTU’s secretary general.
Det bliver værre i 2014
“The situation is likely to get worse in 2014, and while we don’t have figures for children who have been forced to get into commercial work, the figure is certainly set to be higher than the child labour statistics that are officially available,” he noted.
Zimbabwean law, which defines children as persons under 18 years old, prohibits any form of employment for children under the age of 13, while those between 13 and 15 years old can work only as supervised apprentices. Children aged between 16 and 18 may be employed commercially, providing they are supervised.
However, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 13 percent of Zimbabwean children are engaged in child labour, which the International Labour Organization defines as work that is harmful to children’s physical and mental development and interferes with their schooling.
A global child labour index for 2012, released in late 2013 by Maplecroft, an international risk analysis firm, ranked Zimbabwe among the 10 worst performers, out of 197 countries surveyed worldwide, for the frequency and severity of its reported child labour incidents.
