TACLOBAN CITY—After five years of hiatus, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) in Eastern Visayas has revived the interagency Eastern Visayas Regional Child Labor Committee (EVRCLC) that tackles issues and concerns for the welfare of child laborers in the region.
“This committee is involved in the programs that will give solution to child-labor problems,” DOLE Assistant Regional Director Roy Buenafe said.
He said this committee also includes representatives from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), Technical Education and Skills Development Authority, the National Economic Development Authority and the local government units from the barangay up to the provincial level.
The EVRCLC had its last activity in 2012 with the drafting of a memorandum of agreement (MOA) for the intensified, sustained and unified implementation of the Philippine Program Against Child Labor in the Eastern Visayas region. Since then, no activity followed.
Buenafe said Eastern Visayas has one of the highest number of child laborers in the country concentrated mainly in Northern Samar and the western part of Leyte province, particularly in Ormoc City, municipality of Kananga and its neighboring towns.
He said, based on statistics from the International Labor Organization (ILO), there are around 250,000 child laborers in Eastern Visayas, where 80 percent are in the informal sector.
Buenafe said, with the reactivation of EVRCLC, its member-agencies reaffirmed their commitment to intensify their child labor-related development programs to help minimize and eradicate it in the region based on the 2012 MOA.
In the 2011 Survey on Children conducted by the National Statistics Office through the support of the ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor, there were 5.5 million working children between 5 years old and 17 years old, representing 19 percent of the 29 million children.
Of the 5.5 million working children, 3.2 million were engaged in child labor, those children who have either worked in a hazardous environment or worked for more than 20 hours a week for children 5 to 14 years old or 40 hours for children between 15 years and 17 years old.
With the support from the ILO, the DSWD launched its Strategic Helpdesks for Information, Education, Livelihood and other Developmental Interventions (SHIELD) program to help combat child labor in the country. Pilot testing is currently being done in the Calabarzon, Bicol and Eastern Visayas regions, where a high number of children are found working in deep-sea fishing, mining, quarrying and agriculture.
The project supports the Philippine Program Against Child Labor 2017-2022 goal of withdrawing 630,000 children from child labor by 2022 and a total of 1 million children by 2025. Specifically, the SHIELD against Child Labor project aims to help eliminate child labor in its worst forms and those in the blanket ban (below 15 years old).
Image credits: Elmer Recuerdo