Working children and educational inclusion in Yemen☆
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.
Section snippets
Poverty in Yemen
Since unification of the north and south in 1990, the Republic of Yemen has seen years of rapid change that have included the Gulf War, civil war, the return of some 800,000 Yemenis from the Gulf, and the launch of a major programme of economic and administrative reform (World Bank, 2003). Despite an improving trend in the country's fortunes, the people of Yemen are among the poorest in the world, with an average income per person of $460. Yemen's PRSP (2003, p. 32), drawing on the 1998
The special educational needs of working children
Working and street children are specifically mentioned as having special educational needs in the UNESCO Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action of 1994.2 Working children's lives may challenge formal school systems in several ways. From a structural point of view, work and school times may
The IPEC
The International Labour Organisation's IPEC began in 1992. Its aim is to work towards the progressive elimination of child labour (see Fig. 1) by strengthening national capacities to address child labour problems, and by creating a worldwide movement to combat it. IPEC also seeks opportunities to contribute to national discussions on the implementation of ILO Conventions, most particularly Convention No. 182 concerning the worst forms of child labour, which covers many aspects that are beyond
IPEC and education inclusion: learning from the Yemeni case
The opening sections of this paper provide ample evidence that poverty is set to remain a pervasive feature of the Yemeni socio-economic landscape for some time to come, and will therefore continue to exert a major influence on family decision-making in relation to children's schooling and working commitments. The review of primary educational quality in Yemen also suggests that improving the capacity of the formal educational system to enrol, retain and support children's achievement is going
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Paper presented to the Learning and Livelihoods UKFIET conference, September 2005