JUNE 06 Newsletter

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A Light Goes Out, But a Legacy Lives On
Joseph Krauss

center, with a couple dozen children sitting around small tables drawing and coloring, the walls behind them decked with past masterpieces. There’s a pottery wheel in the corner, and an oud, an Eastern version of the guitar, leaning against the wall waiting for the time in the afternoon when everyone circles up and sings. The scene seems normal enough, with the kids flitting back and forth between tables, giggling, shrieking, trading colors, and showing off their work. And yet on the following day all of them will return to their more frequent incarnations, as full-time laborers in local pottery factories, part of the growing ranks of Egypt’s youngest and hardest workers.

Tucked away in a maze of narrow alleys, sunken doorways, and crumbling brown buildings just south of Old Cairo, the center, called the “Uniqueness Project,” is run by volunteers and funded entirely by private donations. The children who come in on Fridays range in age from 10 to 15 and have dropped out of school, if they ever went at all. They work at least a forty hour week and, though they are paid less than half of an adult’s wage, they provide vital income for their families. But every Friday they get a break: two square meals, time and space to run and play, literacy classes, and vocational training, all designed to provide practical skills and a taste of normal childhood.

The project was inspired by Dr. Ahmad Abdallah Rozza, a legendary human rights activist and prolific scholar popularly known as “the lantern of the poor.” He passed away last month at the age of 56. In 1993 Abdallah opened the al-Geel Center in Ain al-Sira, a poor tannery district in the shadow of Cairo’s old Roman aqueduct, where he was born and raised. Dedicated to researching the problem of child labor and other youth-related issues, the center launched a pilot project in 1995 aimed at providing partial care for working children. That project ended in 2000, but since then several similar initiatives have arisen throughout the city, among them the Uniqueness Project, all aimed at providing education, vocational training, and recreational space for full-time child laborers.

From the beginning, Abdallah insisted on complete independence, not only from the government but also from international organizations. In his writings he criticized the Egyptian government for alternatively ignoring the problem of child labor or simply dismissing it as an inevitable consequence of poverty. But he was equally critical of international campaigns aimed at banning the imports of goods produced by children, believing that such bans were more motivated by narrow commercial interests than humanitarian concern, and that they worsened the problem by hurting the economy.

Instead, Abdallah charted a middle course, aiming to provide working children not only with a space in which to play and interact as kids, but the opportunity to learn basic skills that would allow them to find safer and better paying work. Part of each Friday is devoted to sculpture, which not only grants the children a creative outlet, but helps them learn skills that can move them into a higher income bracket at the factories.

The children who come to the center are part of a worldwide phenomenon that has come under scrutiny in recent years as more and more emerging economies have signed onto international conventions and free trade agreements that seek to curtail the practice. According to figures released this year by the International Labor Organization (ILO), 218 million children worldwide are involved in some kind of labor, with the majority, 126 million, employed in “hazardous work.”

The issue has received a fair amount of attention in recent years, not only from international organizations like the ILO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) but from the anti-sweatshop movement and Western exporters who consider the child labor used in many developing countries to constitute an unfair trade advantage. At both the Africa Cup, hosted by Egypt in February of this year, and at this summer’s World Cup, the ILO carried out a football-themed “Red Card for Child Labor” campaign aimed at raising awareness in order to eliminate child labor. The efforts seem to be paying off. This year the ILO recorded overall numbers falling for the first time, with the number of child laborers dropping by 11 percent and the number involved in hazardous occupations falling by 26 percent internationally.

In Egypt, however, the authorities have been slow to act. A 1996 law prevents anyone under 14 from working, and the country has signed on to all the relevant international codes governing child labor, however the rules are rarely enforced, and the government estimates that around 2.7 million children go to work each day. The government claims to be addressing the issue through the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood (NCCM), an organization headed by First Lady Suzanne Mubarak and committed to eliminating child labor. In 2001 it carried out the first and only survey on child labor in Egypt, but did not release the results until February of this year, and the ILO’s 2006 report on child labor provides no updated figures for the Middle East.

Critics of the NCCM say that the foot-dragging was at least in part political. As a signatory to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child and the two ILO conventions on minimum age and the worst forms of child labor, Egypt could potentially be held accountable for its child labor policies by trading partners or international organizations.

The lack of openness may have been linked to worries over pending trade agreements. In the five years between when the survey was carried out and when the results were released, Egypt entered into an Association Agreement with the EU and an agreement with the United States and Israel creating special industrial zones permitting duty-free access to the U.S. market. The main beneficiary of both was Egypt’s textile industry, which employs an estimated 25 percent of the country’s entire labor force. Although few Egyptian children work in clothes manufacturing, over a million children a year work in the fields each summer tending Egypt’s prized long-stem cotton, whose only major competitor is the genetically engineered Pima strain grown in the US.

The more fundamental problem with combating child labor is that poor countries like Egypt depend on it. Even those who are committed to eliminating child labor privately admit that to do so in one fell swoop would be disastrous, forcing poor families to choose between losing vital income and sending their children to work in far more dangerous occupations in the black market. At least 14 percent of Egyptian child laborers are primary household providers, which often means that their wages keep their siblings in school.

The al-Geel model explicitly takes such considerations into account, but given its activist roots and emphatic independence, it is unlikely to figure into the government’s strategy for dealing with child labor. That doesn’t seem to bother the volunteers at the Uniqueness Project, or the kids, who are happy just to have a place where they can be children again. As for Ahmed Abdullah, he will be missed, but his legacy lives on.