Hazardous Child labour- Causes and Consequences on the Children’s Education: The Case of Mekelle City

Abstract

Child labour is a pervasive problem in Ethiopia as well as in Tigray region. Though different interventions are being made by different concerned bodies especially by Tigray Social Affairs Office and different NGOs, they are all targeted on street children and child labour especially the hazardous once are not identified as a social problem yet. Unless it is given due attention and supported by this kind of research, child labour will remain a major challenge to the progress that the city have to make to achieve Education for All by 2015. Therefore, this study is aimed to fill this knowledge gap focusing on hazardous work settings, which are working in small industries and in vehicles/taxies, in the city. The objective of this study was to identify the causes of hazardous child labour and it consequence on the children’s education. The study was descriptive by its nature and statistical tests of correlation were used to determine the causes of child labour and the association between variables. Accordingly, all the socio economic factors have already identified to have low association with labour participation in the small industries while income and migration has strong correlation with labour participation in vehicles. To examine the consequence of child labour on the educational status of the children, international educational indicators were used and the result indicates that the school participation and school progression rate of child labourers are far worse as compared to the non laborers.