ILO 'plays soccer' for laboured children in Sialkot
07 Jul '06
3 min read
While in 1996, an estimated 7,000 children were working stitching footballs, IPEC monitors have found no instances of child labour at the soccer ball stitching centres since March 1999, and the bulk of the production had been transferred to these centres from homes.
IPEC and its partners succeeded in educating more than 10,000 children through 255 non-formal education centres, and mainstreaming 5,800 of them into the formal education system. Jobs for women were secured by setting up a number of all-female stitching centres.
Raising awareness of the value of education and the negative impact of premature involvement in work for children has contributed significantly to the goal of eliminating child labour in the football stitching industry and more widely in the Sialkot area.
Today, efforts continue to remove children from the less than 5 per cent of stitching workplaces that do not participate in the monitoring programme and other branches, including the surgical industry. Thanks to the ILO-IPEC programme, most of these children removed from work attend formal schools in Sialkot, or having successfully completed their schooling, are now working under improved conditions in local factories.
The district Government spends around 70 per cent of its budget on education, and has passed a resolution to make Sialkot a child labour-free zone.
Following the project launching ceremony in the SCCI offices last June, a former professional football player kicked off the match between a local football youth team and a team of former football stitchers.
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