Kenya lacks the resources to save enslaved children, severely abused and excluded from primary education

   Submitted by Siriel Admin on 2004 Nov 4 - 11:11am 

   [Themes:  | Global issue | Kenya | •Causes & solutions | ::Justice & Human Rights:: ]

Original title : Free Schooling – Good, but not Enough (EDUCATION-KENYA)
by Joyce Mulama, Inter Press Service News Agency (IPS), Nov. 3. 2004.

Excerpt : “About 1.9 million (children) of ages five to 17 have not yet been able to access free primary education because they are busy working,” Margaret Basigwa, head of the National Council for Children’s Services (NCCS) told IPS in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
The Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that 17.5 percent of the 1.9 million children are employed as domestics. Many of these persons are said to endure abuse.

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NAIROBI, Nov 3 (IPS) – By any measure, the enrolment of over a million extra children in Kenya’s primary school system over the past two years is a success story. Enrolment figures in the East African country burgeoned after President Mwai Kibaki introduced free primary education in 2003, when he took over as head of state from Daniel arap Moi.

One group of children has little to cheer about in this regard, however, namely child workers. Rights activists warn that government will have to couple its policy of free primary schooling with laws making education compulsory if these children are to be brought in from the cold.

“About 1.9 million (children) of ages five to 17 have not yet been able to access free primary education because they are busy working,” Margaret Basigwa, head of the National Council for Children’s Services (NCCS) told IPS in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. The NCCS is a government body that coordinates the activities of all children’s organisations in Kenya.

The Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that 17.5 percent of the 1.9 million children are employed as domestics. Many of these persons are said to endure abuse.

In the case of girls this frequently takes the form of sexual molestation by men in the household. Ironically, this may earn female servants the wrath of wives.

“In many cases, the wife will even scald the girl to disfigure her thoroughly on the assumption that she wants to snatch the woman’s husband,” Mwirigi Bikuri, manager of the child labour programme at the African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN), said in an interview with IPS.

“The men will on the other hand demand sex from the house-girls when the wives have gone to work. The men will even pretend to have forgotten phones in the house and go back after their wives have left and have sex with these girls,” he added. In country where more than two million of the approximately 30-million-strong population are HIV-positive, this behaviour puts many young girls at risk of contracting AIDS.

In addition, children employed as domestic servants are often overworked and denied food. Thirteen-year-old Caroline Ajuma’s day begins at 04.30, for example; she works in a home in Komarock estate on the outskirts of Nairobi.

“I start by fetching water…warming bathing water for the wife, husband, their two school-going children and three-month-old baby. I follow with preparing breakfast and special food for the infant before escorting the two older children to school,” she told IPS.

When Ajuma returns, she has her breakfast – then cleans dishes and cares for the baby. At 16.00, it’s time to collect the other two children from school.

“I have to prepare dinner as I ensure that the back-from-school children have done their homework; then put the infant to sleep. I clean up (and) iron clothes for the next day. By the time I retire to bed, it is 12 (at night),” said Ajuma, who claims to have been beaten by her employer for waking up late.

As payment for adhering to a schedule which leaves little room for her own schooling, Ajuma receives 6.25 dollars a month. This money is sent to her grandmother, whom Ajuma says takes care of her five siblings. Their parents died from AIDS-related illnesses about five years ago.

The damage wrought by HIV and poverty goes to the heart of what drives children like Ajuma into employment.

“More than a half of the children in Kenya, that is 8.6 million out of a total of 16 million live below the poverty line. In such circumstances, parents force their children into working, including in the domestic sector to supplement family income,” Basigwa says.

“HIV/AIDS, which has orphaned many children and given rise to child-headed households, is also to blame,” she adds.

The employment of children as domestics reportedly occurs in both rural and urban areas. There are concerns that agents who recruit children for domestic service sometimes sell them into prostitution – or into situations of slave labour, where the children are obliged to work for free.

Bikuri has taken the government to task over its efforts to combat abuse of child domestics, claiming that there simply are not enough officials on the ground to solve problems.

“For example, the children crisis desk, it is only in Nairobi. We need these services to be decentralised to the divisions and at the community level where people can walk to report cases of child abuse,” he notes. The crisis desk was set up in 2000, but has only one telephone line which can be used to report cases of child abuse.

However, Basigwa dismisses this complaint.

“Setting up the crisis desk in itself exhibits keenness on the part of the government. The government is short of resources but it is trying,” she says.

“It is time we stopped pointing an accusing finger at the government. Kenyans themselves are responsible for employing under-age children and abusing them against the law. Why doesn’t the public do its part of respecting the law?”

A neighbour who fails to report a suspected case of child abuse may be equally reluctant to report lack of school attendance on the part of domestics.

However, Bikuri maintains that making education compulsory is a key part of efforts to cut down on the employment of under-age children – and on abuse of child domestics.

“In the absence of policies and laws to address the issue of retaining children in school and compelling parents and guardians to take children to schools, we will not be able to solve the problem of child workers in Kenya,” he notes. (END/2004)