Greater laws needed in Tunisia to curb child labour, says minister

Tunisia’s social affairs minister has called for new policies to be introduced to keep children in school until the age of 16 and prevent child labour.

Mohamed Trabelsi called for the pressing need to “establish adequate policies…to guarantee that children go to school until they are at least 16 years old.”

We have 100,000 children who leave school early for one reason or another, especially in the rural regions. It mainly affects girls.

Trabelsi spoke at the launch of a project that will fight child labour in Tunisia over the next three years. The project was developed with the International Labour Organisation and has received $3 million in funding from the United States so far.

National coordinator for the project, Naima Zaghdoudi, explained how child labour in Tunisia seemed to be most common in the “agriculture [sector], mainly in family-run farms”, in domestic work for young girls, small carpentry workshops, garages and hairdressers.

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Children are often allowed to drop out of school without a valid reason which often means they join the labour force to support their families or the girls remain home and are put in charge of domestic affairs before being married earlier than if they had pursued an education.

The levels of child labour are not concretely known due to a lack of statistical data quantifying how many children drop out of school on average and how many currently make up the labour market.

To change this, the Tunisian National Statistics Institute will survey 15,000 homes to obtain statistics on child labour that will be revealed in September, according to Zaghdoudi.