Michael Bourdillon (ed.), Earning a Life: Working Children in Zimbabwe

Harare: Weaver Press, 2000

This is a collection of readable and interesting accounts of children in different kinds of work and working conditions in Zimbabwe. It includes studies of children working in rural, town and cities and in occupations as varied as plantation workers, street vendors, house helps and health care providers. This book makes a special effort capture the reality of their working children informants, who were interviewed individually and in focus groups. It takes a child-centred perspective that respects and listens to working children, that tries to understand the role of work in their lives, and that considers with balance and sensitivity the question of what is in their best interests. The editor, Michael Bourdillon, is a professor in the University of Zimbabwe department of sociology, and his co-contributors are affiliated with various universities and NGOs.

Most of the book is dedicated to case study chapters covering particular types of working children, but several important themes wind through them all. Bourdillon and the other authors contributing to the various chapters first of all emphasize the need to fully understand working children and their situation before intervening in their work through either public policy or targeted programmes. Especially through children’s eyes and voices, the reader is brought to appreciate the complexity of their lives and to realize that simplistic, over-generalised child labour policies are likely to be useless or even counterproductive in protecting them. As the book points out, "instead of dwelling on the negative effects of working, we should [also] look at how work has contributed to an improvement in the children’s lives."

A second theme of the book is that economic and other conditions frequently make it necessary for children to work in order to meet their basic needs, maintain family solidarity and even attend school. Working, even in conditions not entirely appropriate for children, is for the youngsters studied often preferable to the consequences of not working, and they tend to resent moves to make their working appear shameful, deviant or illegal. The book reports numerous cases in which the enforcement of blanket legal prohibitions against children working would be irrelevant to the real problems and even counterproductive to the welfare of the children involved. As Bourdillon puts it, "Few children feel liberated when adults try to remove one of the few options for coping with their difficult situations."

A third theme of the book is the necessity of providing real economic and social advancement opportunities for children and their families. The profiles of the children studied strongly suggest that they cannot be effectively protected simply by focusing on their work apart from other aspects of their lives, for their work is a strategy to hold off the worst consequences of poverty, collapsed government services, and social neglect. "Where we find children working for long hours out of necessity, this is a symptom of serious problems in society. But it is a symptom, not the problem." The way to end child labour is not to reduce still further the survival mechanisms of the poor, but to provide them with basic services and ensure them viable livelihood options that make desperate survival strategies unnecessary.

A fourth principal theme is the urgent need to listen to children and to involve them in the development of policies and programmes intended to benefit them. As the authors of the chapter on street children report, "The street children have been excluded from any dialogue towards solving the problems that confront them. The result is the present stalemate that is characterised by deep-seated suspicion between the street children and civil society as represented by the state and local authorities. There is little doubt that interventions that have been applied to the problem up to this point are unworkable. The reason is that the street child’s perceptions have never been considered in our attempts to resolve the problem. As long as the victims of the circumstances remain excluded . . . our efforts will boil down to naught." It is argued that developing measures to prevent work and working conditions injurious to children should be developed in consultation with working children themselves. "This will ensure that action is based on familiarity with the children’s lives and thus enhance the likelihood of its success. Promoting the participation of working children in solving their own problems may also reduce the possibility of interventions having unforeseen negative consequences."

Whereas much current international rhetoric about child labour suggests that children’s work and their education are inherently incompatible, Earning a Life reports in a number of its studies that children work in order to pay the expenses necessary to attend school. In such cases, child work makes education possible, even though its long hours may also reduce the regularity of children’s attendance or their ability to learn. One interesting chapter details institutional arrangements by which some secondary school students trade work—harder and longer work than one might wish for youngsters going to school—on tea estates for a solid boarding-school education. While the authors express reservations about combing school with almost full-time work, they also found the system to offer a high quality of instruction in better than average facilities and to provide one of the few ways in which children of the rural poor could realistically obtain a secondary education. Where government does not provide free education, such institutionalized earn-and-learn schemes may represent the most realistic opportunity, albeit one less than ideal, for rural children to receive an education allowing them to escape poverty.

After examining children’s work in a variety of occupations and conditions, Bourdillon in his summing-up concludes that "the way to deal with the problems faced by working children is to focus on their rights, rather than on controlling them." This entails, first of all, making space for their active participation in solving their problems. In regards to national employment policy, he turns the usual thinking on its head. "We would like a society and a world where children do not need to work. We do not have such a society in Zimbabwe, although it is likely this would be possible if the country’s resources were distributed differently. Meanwhile, children need work. As long as this is the case, far from trying to abolish child labour, we should be encouraging adults to supply the employment that some of our children need. At the same time, we should be finding ways to ensure that the children receive the necessary support and protection." Bourdillon and his contributors intend to address only the situation in Zimbabwe, but one suspects that their provocative observations in fact apply to many children and places in many parts of the world. They therefore deserve to be widely heard.

Reviewed by Bill Myers