An Assessment of the Impact of Child Labor on Female Children Educational Opportunities, In The Case Of Kechene Community, Addis Ababa
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Date
2015-10-13
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Child labor is a very common global problem. There are about 250 million child laborers in the world, in sub-Saharan Africa, and around half of child laborers – 115 million children in total - are engaged in hazardous employment. About 7.5 million children are estimated to be found in Ethiopia. Most of the children have no educational opportunities because they are engaged in child labor (ILO 1996).
Girls are more vulnerable than boys and they represent 54% of the out-of-school population. Girls work in the household, agricultural work and home-based work is often vital for survival although their work is largely invisible and unvalued. (Education International, October 2013)
As kechene community is one of the communities from Gulele sub city in Addis Ababa which is large number of children laborers found on pottery and weaving activities.
To explore the impact of child labor on the educational opportunity of female children at Kechene community
Applying qualitative research method which is descriptive and exploratory.
informants mentioned that many families do not send their female children to school for the purpose of using their labor. Though the root cause is their economic capacity, they elaborated that for some family children’s work is the main source of the whole family’s income. The response of the influence of female child labor on their education has been summarized in to eight basic themes: bargaining the opportunity to access school, Repeated absent from class every week Friday (it is the critical working day for pottery made family, ready for Saturdays market ) , low participation in the class, shortage of time to study, doing home work and participate in educational course work, create feeling of exhaustion, bullied by students and sometimes by the teacher, low in their academic performance and end with school dropout or class repetition .
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From the summary of the research, it is clear that female children’s education is compromised of their labor. The researcher has come to see that female children students are more influenced through child labor because other than poetry and weaving activities, the female children are also expected to take on domestic activities
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child labour; female child labour; educational opportunity