ISLAMABAD: Out of the 388,000 children between the ages of 5–17 in Gilgit-Baltistan, 14.3 percent are working and most of them are in child labour (91.2 percent of working children, and 13.1 percent of all children (5–17 years).
This has been revealed by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) in its “Gilgit-Baltistan Child Labour Survey (G-BCLS) 2018-2019”, which is the first child labour survey conducted in Pakistan since 1996.
The survey further noted that the percentage of girls engaged in household chores is 69 percent, while that of boys is 56.7 percent. Most children are engaged in household chores for seven hours or less (78 percent), while 13.6 percent are engaged for eight to 14 hours. Older children and girls tend to devote more time to those activities than younger children and boys.
The percentage of households with at least one child in child labour is three times as high in rural (30.2 percent) compared to urban areas (10.0 percent). The highest child labour prevalence is in Shigar with 27.8 percent and lowest in Diamer with 5.8 percent.
The survey further revealed that the rate of boys engaged in child labour is slightly higher (13.6 percent) than that of girls (12.5 percent). Most of the children in child labour belong to the age group 14–17 (23.7 percent), followed by children aged 10–13 years (16.4 percent), and children aged 5–9 years (4.2 percent).
The median number of hours worked per week for children in child labour varies from 3.5 hours for the age group 5–9 to 11.5 hours for the age group 14–17.
Children in child labour mostly work as unpaid family workers (83.1 percent), work in agriculture, forestry, or fishing (76.2 percent), and are employed in elementary occupations (52.5 percent).
Girls work more frequently in water collection (22.6 percent) compared to boys (6.0 percent).
More than a quarter of all households have at least one child in child labour and the child labour rate decreases with the wealth index of the household. While almost 40 percent of households in the poorest wealth index quintile have a child in child labour, 14.5 percent of households in the richest wealth index quintile do. However, the analysis illustrates that policy to reduce child labour needs to take the complexities of child labour into account and go beyond targeting poor and uneducated households in rural areas.
The report revealed that of the 10–17-year-old in child labour, 74.8 percent work in an unhealthy environment, such as in extreme hot or cold conditions or carrying heavy loads and around 20 percent of children in child labour suffer from abuse at work. As negative consequences of work children primarily report extreme fatigue, a serious issue for children in their development process, and poor grades in school for older children. Children in child labour are more likely to get injured or ill due to work compared to working children not in child labour, it added.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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