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Child labor has become one of the most major concerns for the whole world. The term child labor means the kind of work that’s somewhat harmful or not suitable for the children of a particular age. It’s not just the physical harm that is associated with the child labor, but child labor also exploits our children in many ways. The children who start working way before their working age usually face issues like mental stress, low morality, lack of education and inferiority complex.
There has been a lot written, and many voices have been raised to tackle this issue, but in all fairness, the percentage of child labor has actually increased instead of getting decreased. UNICEF has already taken the initiative to look into the matter, and they are doing some commendable work, but the matter of fact is that a single organization is never going to succeed against the poverty that compels our children to work for their earnings.
Roughly estimated, 10% of children aged 10-14 in Asia are forced to work due to poverty or some other reasons and there isn’t any support for them since the NGO’s or the children organizations can’t cover such vast grounds.
Source: Voice of Journalists
As per the reports, in Pakistan, there are around 7- 10 million children (aged 5-14) out of 70 million who are working for their earnings and most of them are even sole breadwinners for their families. The government of Pakistan has made some strict rules and guidelines to save the working children from too much burden but sadly, there aren’t much people(owners, bosses) that follow the rules and hence these rules are far from practicality.
Source: Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal
We all are aware that 40 % of our population is living a life below the poverty line and are being deprived of necessities such as shelter, food, and clothing which force their children to work so it’s our duty to help them and the first step is to stop breaching the rules that are designed to avoid child labor.
Secondly, we should raise our voices for children funds to be increased and we shall see that there would be a drop in the percentage of child labor once our government announces proper allowances for them. Moreover, we should also raise the standard of education in villages and slum areas, and class-based education system should be eliminated which will drastically help to decrease the ratio of child labor in the countryside.
Conclusively, we should join hands in order to address this issue since no child deserves to live a life that’s tougher than he can actually endure.
