Child Labor Program (CLP)

As Svay Rieng has dozens of economic development zones with 55 garment factories and enterprises and 19 casinos and has many cassava and sugarcane farms along the border, it has provided a lot of employment opportunities for community people and mainly contributed to the development of the livelihood of community people especially the poor. Due to the poverty and low level of income, most children are pushed to participate in income generation to support their families. Although the MOU between ILO and garment factories and enterprises to eliminate child labor has been recently signed, child labor remains the issue. Some poor families ask their children to help earning income which results in dropping out school. In some cases, in order to get job, some children who are below employment age use fake birth certificate. The local government lack of understanding on labor law and has a pity on the children and their family so that they issue a fake birth certificate to increase age for children to get a job. As for Svay Teap district, this location is not an economic zone where has no factories and casinos but 4 cassava and sugar cane farms invested by Vietnam companies. These farms have provided work opportunities for hundreds of workers including young workers. Besides farms located in Cambodia land, it also has many farms along border in Vietnam land absorbing a lot of Cambodia workers especially children to go across the border illegally to work for daily income. Most of migrated children work in hazardous condition and are vulnerable of exploitation and abuse.

Based on the real concerns of people which is found by baseline survey, SSO has designed the project named “eliminating child labor in agricultural and handicraft sectors” which is implemented within 01 year of project period from January to December, 2016 in 2 communes/Sangkats ( Popet commune and Sangkat Chrak Mtes) covering 20 villages in order to address those issues especially eliminate child labor and improve their living condition of vulnerable families by following 4Ps strategies (prevention, provision, promotion and prosecution) and setting out specific activities such as establish child peer groups with capacity building training, provide capacity building training to Child Labor Monitoring Committee (CLMC), support child peers and CLMC to conduct awareness raising of child labor, support educational service or vocational training to child victim and vulnerable children in term of child labor , improve income generation through small business, saving group and agricultural production.

In order to implement the project effectively and efficiently, SSO will make the close cooperation among project partners such as; (1) local authorities at all levels, CBOs, Provincial department of labor and vocational training and private sector.