Working children and educational inclusion in Yemen

Abstract

The Republic of Yemen has a very high number of working children, employed in a variety of occupations, ranging from street vending to guards on farms, and domestic labour. Including these children in formal education is a major challenge facing the Republic, which has one of the lowest rates of female participation in primary education in the world, and a very underdeveloped non-formal sector. In a context where poverty levels are very high, particularly in rural areas, families remain under significant financial pressure to rely on children's work to supplement, or indeed provide, their income and survival. This broader context challenges school-based efforts to include working children, particularly where initiatives aiming to improve the quality of the formal system are only just beginning to make an impact. This paper discusses key challenges of providing education to working children in Yemen, focusing on the work of the International Labour Organisation's International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) and some of the issues that it faces in using schooling as a strategy to prevent child labour.

Introduction

The Republic of Yemen has very high numbers of children working in a range of occupations, both in the public and private domains. Levels of poverty and population growth are both high. Education, and particularly formal schooling, is seen as a key means of working towards the prevention of child work by both the Yemeni government, and the International Labour Organisation through its International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC). The quality of the educational system in Yemen, by all accounts, leaves much to be desired, although reforms are now under way. In this country context, IPEC has adopted a strategy of working directly within mainstream schooling. Commendable though this strategy is, it underlines the need for a development agency to understand in some detail the processes (or ‘black box’, see Rose and Dyer, 2006) of the schooling system and how systemic capacity is likely to impact on the uptake of its messages—in this case, IPECs education for prevention strategy. While in Yemen the pressure to act speedily on the scale of the problem is intense, this paper argues that an intervention strategy that lacks an understanding of context and relies primarily on the conventional cascade and input-orientated model to disseminate its messages is likely to lack both impact and sustainability. Now that the first intervention phase, initial training of the Core Group and development of training materials, is over, the paper contends that scaling up to cover more schools is not the next logical programme step. Drawing on empirical experience and the limited and often contested evidence of the quality of the education system in Yemen, I argue that the programme needs to think beyond the size of the challenge and focus instead on understandings its context, and then integrating this understanding into the processes of promoting educational inclusion for working children. To do this, it would consolidate and support a small number of schools, and develop detailed understandings of how actors in this particular educational system learn to act on the IPEC messages.

This paper draws on my experiences as the ILO-contracted education consultant to IPEC in Yemen; I was requested initially to write a manual and train the Core Group. Previous experience in India (e.g. Dyer, 2000, Dyer et al., 2004) suggested limited utility of the conventional, manual-led cascade training approach that ILO was proposing; my suggestion of a more active, participatory approach to the training of these trainers was readily accepted. ILO agreed to my request to undertake an initial exploratory field visit to generate qualitative data about schooling processes, since there were none to draw on to inform the training initiative, and then proceed to a second phase of developing training materials and training the Core Group. For this second phase, I adopted an integrated approach of modelling/training in participatory approaches, jointly developing materials with the Core Group via templates I had designed on the basis of the first phase of field work (described later in the paper), and UK-based desk study. The resulting completed ‘manual’ was thus a locally generated, negotiated product, owned by those who would use it. There was considerable personal opposition from a very senior Ministry official to training without a pre-designed manual, but he gracefully capitulated to vociferous demands from participants that he actually experience a morning of training, after which he changed his mind. This experience further underlines my suggestion that IPEC would benefit from engaging more consciously with its own influence and potential as an educational actor.