‘Breaking Stones After School’
ASU professor lectures on child labor in East Africa

By Cara Kelly

It is 4:30 a.m., and 14-year-old Sam is ready to start another excruciatingly long day. Making his way to the “world bank,” a stone quarry that provides gravel for much of Uganda, Sam begins his arduous day filled with intense manual labor and a few hours of school spent in an overcrowded hut.

“I often reach school late because of the fatigue and not having eaten in the morning, I even sleep in the class and cannot concentrate,” Sam said. “Sometimes, during lunch time, I run back to the rocks to hit the stones and do this after school to ensure that at least I can receive some money for food at the end of the day. Now I believe my future is not so bright.”

Sam is just one of the children in the village of Lira who must work in addition to attending school so he has enough food to eat.

“(The villagers) call it the ‘world bank’ because it is a reliable source of income,” Vachel Miller said during a lecture held at the Belk Library and Information Commons at Appalachian State University.

“You come up the road and there are these series of massive boulders coming up the hill. The men start fires underneath the boulders to break them into smaller pieces and you see women with old sledgehammers and a baby next to them, resting in the sun. The children work pounding on the smallest rocks in the hot sun for hours all day.”

Miller, an assistant professor in Appalachian’s Department of Leadership and Educational Studies, recently returned from a three-year stay in East Africa, where he worked for a project called KURET (Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia Together), funded by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Miller and colleagues worked directly with children, such as Sam, in an effort to learn more about the problems associated with child labor to determine practical solutions to reduce its infringement on children’s rights and to increase universal primary education.

Based on a 2006 report, Miller informed listeners that there are 190 million working children globally, with the highest percentage in sub-Saharan Africa.

Statistics from a household survey in Uganda reveal that of children age five to 13, 23-25 percent are working.
“There is a group of over a third that are combining economic activity and school,” Miller said. “There is a relatively small percentage that are only working.”

Miller found that the most common types of child labor were subsistent agricultural jobs, petty trade, domestic servitude, stone quarrying, herding or shepherding, brick making, restaurant jobs and commercial sex work.

Young girls were found working more than boys the same age, with many tending to household chores in their own homes in addition to working as servants in wealthier families’ homes.

“It adds up more for the girls because they are babysitting, washing the clothes and cooking over an open fire for long hours,” he said. “It falls outside of economic production, although it really impacts the time girls have for their education.”

Generally, as children grow older, their workload increases.

“Most six-year-olds work between 15 to 18 hours a week, and at 17, they are working 30 to 40 hours a week,” Miller said. “I think about my six-year-old and as much as I can get him to do is move his plate to the sink or put away his clothes.”

There are many deep social and cultural reasons for the high rate of child labor in Africa. Children must contribute to the family to supplement their parents’ income to afford necessities, including food and clothing, most often working alongside their parents to be in the family business.

The absence of a good credit system in Africa is one factor Miller noticed in the demand for child labor.

“Children will have to do the work to earn the money if there is a shock to the system with the absence of credit, to buffer against floods and droughts, etc.”

In addition, Miller and other researchers have found that there is a direct correlation between HIV/AIDS and child labor.

“The leading cause of death in Africa is HIV/AIDS, and it is a great contributor to child labor, one of the primary causes,” Miller said. “As one increases, the other increases. They are replacing their parents, and when a parent goes down, it is usually the first girl who is pulled out of school to take care of the parent.”

Staff of the KURET Project and other organizations is trying to increase the number of children able to attend school by eliminating the costs associated with education. Although many places have adopted policies of universal free primary education, there are always some fees attached for uniforms, books and the PTA, for example.

“The cost of school, small though they are, will prevent children from going to school,” he said.

By paying school fees and providing a uniform, pencils and other essential supplies required by schools, KURET and other organizations, in a sense, are sponsoring children so they can attend school.

Miller and colleagues also worked to raise awareness by talking about child labor with families and communities about the problem and conducting participatory research.

“We got tired of hiring consultants to do research and said, ‘We’re smarter than this; let’s help people do their own research.’ They know a lot about child labor in their communities; let’s help them determine the steps on their own,” Miller said.

The staff helped community members make maps of areas where children are working, ranking the most common types of child labor, composing a seasonal calendar to show the intensity of different months and potential solutions.

“The people all of a sudden had their own detailed analysis of where and when child labor happens, so it moves to community action of how to prevent child labor,” he said.

Passing the importance of working toward ending child labor onto the community members is the most essential step, according to Miller, to ensure sustainability.

The biggest issue with the project, Miller said, was what will happen to the children after it is over.

“If KURET pulls out, it will be like cleaning a pig and then leaving it in its pig sty. The pig will get dirty again,” the head teacher of River of Life Primary School said to Miller before his departure. “If this happens, children who have been pulled out of child labor will go back full blown. They should not be left at this point.”

Yet, Miller remains hopeful that World Vision and other organizations hosting the same types of programs will ultimately, although slowly, will make progress.

“When it works, one of the things we found is that having children in school helps parents feel ‘at peace’ with the community,” Miller said. “They felt bad their students had to be working, they felt more socially respectable if their students could stop working and go to school. Both students and parents felt a greater sense of pride, ‘I am somebody, I have a future.’ The sense of a positive future counterbalanced loss of material income children were doing, although not always.”

Miller’s lecture, “Breaking Stones After School: Challenges of Removing Children from Exploitative Labor in East Africa,” was sponsored by the Doorway International Program Series through the Belk Library.
The program is a collaborative effort with the Office of International Education and Development to “build a relationship among people based on international interests.”

“We wanted to highlight the library’s international resources in addition to getting people talking about international issues and hopefully see some cross-disciplinary collaborations,” lead acquisitions librarian Georgie Donovan said.

The series will continue with “The Artists’ Life Today in China and Contemporary Chinese Art,” by visiting art professor Xuewu Zhang. The lecture will be held Thursday, Nov. 20 from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. in room 028 of the Belk Library.