Welcome to the workspace on Cash Transfers and Child Labour!
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Why this workspace?
In recent years, the perceived success of
several large-scale conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes, notably
Mexico’s Progresa (now Oportunidades) and Brazil’s Bolsa
Escola (now Bolsa Familia), has provoked substantial interest in and
support for replicating such programmes around the world. CCTs provide cash to poor households – often
women in the household – in exchange for sending their children to school
and/or participation in health and nutrition programmes.
Most CCT programmes are aimed at reducing
current and future poverty, the former through cash transfers and the latter by
promoting the development of human resources through education, better health
and improved nutrition. The reduction of child labour as such is rarely an
objective in its own right, although various studies have shown that some such
programmes – for example Mexico’s Progresa – have also been effective in
reducing child labour even when this was not an explicit objective.
The potential role of cash transfers in
reducing child labour is an issue of great interest to those working on child
labour, not least to ILO’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child
Labour (IPEC). Are CCT programmes, for example, suitable for poorer developing countries,
notably in Africa, where infrastructure is less well developed than in Latin
America, resources more limited and supply constraints (schools, clinics, etc.)
more severe? Would the resources necessary for targeting and ensuring
compliance with conditions not be better spent on improving social services
across the board? These and similar questions need to be more thoroughly
investigated at a time when the CCT programmes are being promoted by the UN
agencies and development banks as an effective approach to extending social
protection, not only in their research and advocacy efforts but increasingly
with the provision of significant resources.
IPEC is in the process of developing a
programme of work on cash transfers and child labour that we hope to refine and
implement in collaboration with partners in and outside of the ILO. The purpose
of this community of practice is to provide an opportunity for the discussion
of the role of cash transfers, conditional or unconditional, in the elimination
of child labour. The scope of its activities will become clearer with time but
it will include sharing information, exchanging views and developing joint
action.
Thank
you and welcome aboard!