Increasing unemployment and poverty in Jordan has forced many children, some as young as 12, to take up jobs under tough physical conditions.
A government-funded center is trying to keep the child labourers off the streets by providing them education rehabilitation and psycho-social support. Al Jazeera’s Nisreen El-Shamayleh reports.
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Mohammed Awamleh sells vegetables on the streets of the Jordanian capital for 12 hours a day to help feed his family. But he is only 14 and would much rather be back in school.
Mohammed is just one of an estimated 33,000 child workers across the small desert kingdom, forced to endure the hard grind of daily working life, often laboring long hours for a paltry wage.
He left school a year ago, and now earns four dinars ($5.6) a day working at a stall in Sweileh, in northwest Amman.
“I had to work because our financial situation is extremely bad,” Mohammed, whom customers call “the little master,” told Agence France-Presse. “My brother is 16 and he also sells vegetables. Our older brother is unemployed. He’s 23.”
In Jordan, a country of around six million people with 70 percent of them under the age of 30, unemployment is 14.3 percent, according to official figures. Independent estimates put it much higher at 25 percent.
Mohammed said his father is ill and needs “non-stop” treatment.
“Life is really hard and it’s getting harder. Every day I dream of leaving this work, going back to school and living a normal life,” he said.
Minister of Social Development Hala Latuf said most children who work are pressured into doing so to improve their families’ income, and estimated the number of child workers at 32,600.
“Society expects them to work and shoulder responsibilities, regardless of what age they are,” Latuf told AFP, adding that most child workers in Jordan are aged between five and 17.
“These uneducated children are in danger. They don’t know their rights and they face health, injury and exploitation risks,” she said.
Mohammed Mahmud is 13 and does not worry about such matters.
“I don’t go to school but I am happy with my work because I help my family,” he said of his 10-hour day selling children’s comics on the streets of Khalda in western Amman.
“I am proud to work. There’s nothing to be ashamed of because I am not a beggar. I have two younger brothers who need to be fed.”
The young teenager, who said he makes around $140 a month, was at first reluctant to talk to AFP, thinking that the reporter was a government labor official.
“They (employment officials) make things hard for me by trying to prevent me from working and confiscating my comics,” complained the youngster, sporting a cowboy hat and a pair of dusty jeans.
Jordanian law sets the minimum working age at 16, and the minimum age for hazardous jobs at 18, according to the labor ministry. “Hazardous” includes operating machinery, heavy lifting and working in extreme temperatures.
The ministry estimates the average monthly income of child workers at $113.
The legal minimum wage in Jordan, which recorded a 14.9-percent inflation rate in 2008, is $155. The government has promised to increase this to $211 in 2009.
It is estimated that 63 percent of child laborers work in agriculture, construction and car repair workshops, with the rest mainly in carpentry, sales, blacksmithing, tailoring and food services.
“The child labor problem has become worrying, and it’s growing,” University of Jordan sociologist Issa Masarweh said.
“Families push their children to work, and employers are the only winners at the end because they exploit children and make them work for next to nothing.”
Analyst Mohammed Masri of the Centre for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan agreed with Masarweh and blamed the authorities for not doing enough.
“The government is not dealing seriously with this clear problem. Introducing strict laws and having labor inspectors is not enough,” he said.
“It needs to find alternatives for those children in order to remove them from the streets, effectively alleviate poverty, reform the educational system and improve their environment.”
Official figures put around 14 percent of the country’s population below the poverty line, but unofficial estimates put the number as high as 31 percent.
Latuf said Jordan, which endorsed the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention in 2000, is “working hard to fight child labor.”
“It’s a complicated problem, not only in Jordan but also worldwide,” she said.
Jordan has launched a National Project for Child Labor, partly funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), to tackle the problem.
It seeks to rehabilitate thousands of working children by providing them with better education, training, health services and recreational programs.
According to UN figures, some 250 million children between the ages of five and 14 work either full time or part time worldwide, with almost half working full time every day, all year round.
The UN says around 50-60 million are between five and 11 years old and work by definition in hazardous circumstances, considering their age and vulnerability.