AFRICA/EGYPT - 2.7 million children aged 6-14 working

Cairo (Agenzia Fides) – Ahmed Ramadan, aged 13, works 11 hours a day in a bakery in Cairo’s Kherbet Kheirala slum, where he says he works with hazardous machinery in unpleasantly hot surroundings, and is ill-treated by his employer. “I wake up at 6am every morning and hurry to the bakery to get the chance to work that day. The bakery uses four different children but only takes on the first to arrive,” he told the news service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. If Ahmed manages to arrive first, he earns 15 Egyptian pounds (US$2.6) for the day, which mainly goes on helping his family pay rent and utility bills. His friend Tareq Al Sayed, 14, has been working as a carpenter for the past three years manning an electric saw. He works12 hours a day and earns 30 Egyptian pounds ($5.2) a week. A 2001 national survey on child labour commissioned by the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood and the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics revealed that 2.7 million children aged 6-14 (21 percent of all children in that age group) work. The child protection officer with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Egypt blamed the phenomenon in part on poverty, lack of awareness, and dropping out of school because of violence or parents’ inability to pay fees, as well as a culture that condones child labor. Egypt is party to International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention 138 on the minimum age for work, and 182 on “the worst forms of child labor”, but a large number of children work. Egypt's law on child labor supposedly prohibits the employment of minors under 14, and occupational training for those under 12; protects minors under 17 from working in hazardous jobs; stipulates that working hours should not exceed six per day, including at least one hour of rest; stipulates that minors must not work more than four hours at a time, and must not do overtime or work on weekends or official holidays; and stipulates that minors should not work 8pm-7am. (AP) (Agenzia Fides 06/07/2010)