The International Labor
Organization (ILO) emphasized on the occasion of the World Day Against Child
Labor, which is marked on the 12th of June 2014, the importance of
concerted international efforts to continue to work on reducing the number of
working children in the world, in order to preserve the developmental
achievements of all countries of the world, and address all drawbacks which
undermine such achievements, ensuring that the number of working children in
the world has decreased 63.3% since the year 2000.
The UAE contributes
in promoting the country’s capabilities of dealing with this issue, and
encourages the global movement to protect against the worst forms of child
labor by 2016, according to ILO Convention, through adopting a strategy to
support the countries of the world in order to achieve the Millennium
Developmental Goals, not only through supporting the achievement of the basic
items and general goals, especially those related to poverty eradication, raising
the level of education, health, and social justice, environmental
sustainability, and psychological health, and other goals, but also through
supporting all necessary elements of logistical support that lead to the
achievement of such goals through adopting a preventive policy, of which education
in its various stages is considered a necessary tool, providing an opportunity
to attend school for each child in the world, expanding the scope of care and
education in the early childhood phase, improving gender parity in primary
school enrollment, and raising the level of children's health.
Dubai Cares has
recently announced the launch of a cooperation program with Pratham, an Indian
organization for education, which aims to promote Indian children’s ability to
read, write, and count, and develop early childhood in India. The program
includes the support of communities in six Indian States through enhancing the
programs that focus on three main subjects: boosting the levels education for
those in local schools in the remote areas, ensuring the preparation of
children to enter first and second grades, and providing support for the
central resources groups, and it is expected that more than one million children
will benefit from this program for three years.
The contributions of
the UAE Red Crescent to UNICEF are estimated at about 18,760,000 million Dirhams,
including contributions in education, health, social life improvement, and children’s
psychological health around the world, in addition to humanitarian
contributions and initiatives by the different authorities and institutions in
the State, and the special initiatives of their Highnesses and Excellency’s,
and the charitable Emiratis.
Among 650 million
children in the world, there are 130 million children that stay in school but
fail to learn the basic skills, whereas 120 million of them don not reach the
fourth grade, and there are 168 million children who work in the world, and the
main reason is the shortage of material resources allocated for education in
those areas, which were far from achieving the goals of education for all, in addition
to the other obstacles such as the health problems, and both lead to skipping
education and heading to work, and other factors that undermine development and
re-raise the indicators of poverty, unemployment, crime and violence, which
drive the requirements of development in the negative direction.
12/06/2014