Jamaica’s Gains in Addressing Child Labour Commended

Jamaica has been commended by the International Labour Organization (ILO) for strides made in addressing child labour.

Speaking with JIS News, Programme Officer for the Regional Initiative, Latin America and the Caribbean Free of Child Labour, Resel Melville, said that Jamaica has served as a Pathfinder Country in the global fight against the scourge.

These are States that are taking immediate and effective measures to eradicate child labour.

“We have been privileged, as the ILO, to work with Jamaica, facilitating their knowledge exchange with other Caribbean counterparts as well as counterparts in the wider Latin America Region,” she said.

Ms. Melville, who is based in the ILO Caribbean office in Port of Spain, Trinidad, was part of a delegation from the Brazil, ILO South-South Mission that visited Jamaica recently.

The team met with representatives from the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and with other stakeholders for discussions on the Regional Initiative to Eradicate Child Labour by 2025.

The Regional Initiative is an inter-governmental platform comprised of 31 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that have been working to achieve the first generation free of child labour in the region.

Jamaica was one of the original countries to sign on to create the platform in 2014, which allows for the participation of trade unions, worker and employer organisations, in keeping with the tripartite nature of the ILO.

Ms. Melville noted the country’s progress in revamping and revitalising the National Action Plan for the Prevention of Child Labour, which helps to map actions and resources that are allocated to mitigate the scourge.

She said that the Regional Initiative has been working with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security to develop a Country Acceleration Plan to further prioritise and target Jamaica’s national action plans to be able to give effect to the results that are to be achieved.

“We have worked with Jamaica to pioneer a particular model that uses data from Jamaica’s Census as well as the Youth Activity Survey. This is called the Child Labour Risk Identification Model (CLRIM) and Jamaica is the only Caribbean country that has been able to use this particular model to analyse its data,” she informed.

The CLRIM is used to generate geographic maps that help to assess the levels of risk that children in different areas, parishes and constituencies face.

With these maps, the Ministry now has a tool that enables it to assess where a lot of its resources are being directed and identify the local partners they need to work with to address the risk factors.

Ms. Melville noted that addressing child labour is not just about removing children from work that is harmful to their physical and mental development but having the tools to take a proactive approach in preventing child labour in the first place.

She pointed out that Jamaica has been using the tools “in such an innovative way that colleagues in the rest of the region – Latin America and the other Caribbean countries – are impressed”.

She cited, for example, Jamaican’s ability to overlay the child labour risk maps, with maps that show how allocations for social programmes like the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) are awarded “and then to determine whether those allocations are indeed addressing the areas of need and the populations at risk in specific geographic areas”.