Banning child labour in developing countriesChild labour has negative impacts upon children’s health. Child labour impedes upon the children’s education, which is vital for the child’s future prospects.
My first contention is that child labour has negative impacts upon children’s health. To strengthen this claim, I will provide two studies that demonstrate that this is true. The first study, conducted by Francois-Charles Wolff, and Maliki, surveys the impact on health that child labour has on Indonesian students, aged between 10-15 simultaneously involved in school and labour. 1 One measure they have used, is to compare the amount of health complaints between non-working and working children. They find a negative correlation, as the working children have more health complaints than the non-working. Wolff and Maliki write: “Working children tend to have more complaints than non-working children and that activities are more likely to have disrupted due to their health problems.
2 In the conclusion, of the report, Wolff and Malaki write: “We have investigated the effects of working activities on health among Indonesian children aged 10–15 years enrolled in school. Results from both descriptive statistics and regressions with the labor participation assumed exogenous leads to a negative correlation between working and health. 5 Another study that demonstrates that child labor is harmful to the worker’s health, was conducted by Roggero et. al, who examined the impacts of health that child labour has had on a wide range of developing countries. 6The authors demonstrate a relationship between mortality rates, undernourishment and child labor prevalence, for children aged between 10-14, with mortality rates and .
. peaid/what/rural-development/index_en. htm6, 7, 8 Roggero et. al. 2007, ‘The Health Impact of Child Labor in Developing Countries: Evidence from Cross-Country Data,’ Am J Public Health, vol 97(2) pp.
271-2759, 11, 12 Human Rights Watch. 2011, ‘A Poisonous Mix: Child Labor, Mercury, and Artisanal Mining in Mali’ Human Rights Watch, Dec. 201110 http://www. miningfacts.
org/Communities/What-is-Artisanal-and-Small-Scale-Mining/13 http://www. ilo. org/ipec/areas/CSEC/lang–en/index. htm14 Child Labour: A Textbook For University Students, pp. 1615 http://www. ilo.
org/ipec/areas/Armedconflict/lang–en/index. htm16, 17, 18, 19, 20 Blanco Allias, F & Hagemann F. 2008, ‘Child labour and education: Evidence from SIMPOC surveys,’ International Labour Organization, June. 2008 21 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3451117.stm
