Tag Archive for: Nigeria

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Nigeria: Rehabilitating Victims of Human Trafficking, Child Labor

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28 August 2012 [from AllAfrica.com]

 

Linda Eroke writes on efforts by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Department for Equal Opportunities (DEO), Italy to rehabilitate victims of human trafficking and child labour

All over the world, trafficking in human beings has been recognised as not only a serious crime, but an abuse of individual’s human rights. According to the United Nations (UN), it is one of the fastest growing areas of international criminal activity, as it often involves a number of different crimes, spanning different countries and involving an increasing number of victims.

Trafficking can be compared to modern day form of slavery because it involves the exploitation of people through force, coercion, threat and deception. It also has consequences not only for the victims but also for their families and the nations involved.

Victims of human trafficking require assistance in order to regain their confidence because of the physical and psychological trauma they experience in the hands of traffickers and this involves medical help, psychological support, legal assistance, shelter and everyday care.

Establishing a National Referral Mechanism

It is against this backdrop that International Labour Organisation (ILO) is working with the National Agency for Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP) and other relevant actors to establish a National Referral Mechanism (NRM) that will cater for the needs of victims of human trafficking and forced labour.

NRM is a comprehensive system of cooperation between governmental and non-governmental agencies involved in promoting human rights and combating human trafficking based on common and internationally recognised standards of activity.

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Workplace Violence, Child Labor in Nigeria

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Robert Evans, Reuters

GENEVA (Reuters) – Some 15 million children work in Nigeria, often in dangerous jobs, and many workers in Africa’s most populous nation live in fear of violence from police and employers, the global labor grouping ITUC said on Monday.

The report said many core international labor standards that the energy-rich African giant has signed up to were regularly breached and there was widespread discrimination against women and minority groups in the labor market.

“Some 15 million children are at work, many in dangerous jobs,” said the ITUC — the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation, which represents some 175 million workers in 151 countries, including Nigeria, around the world.

“Unions frequently experience violent attacks and there is little protection from anti-union discrimination,” said the report submitted to the 153-member World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva.

Women and minority groups face discrimination in getting jobs and getting promotion, it said. “The gender pay gap stands at 68 percent and the majority of women are employed in precarious and informal economic activities.”

The WTO is this week discussing Nigeria’s trade policies, a process through which all its members pass regularly, and the ITUC insists that the trade body should also look at labor practices.

But WTO officials, and most developing country trade diplomats, say labor conditions — despite efforts in the past by the United States and some European countries to bring them in — remain outside its remit.

Nigeria, with a population of some 155 million and extensive oil resources, has ratified all eight of the core International Labor Organization (ILO) conventions protecting workers’ rights including freedom of unions to organize and ending child labor.

But in a statement with the report, which detailed attacks on workers and union offices, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said, “Nigeria has failed to live up to this. Many Nigerian workers live in fear of employer and police violence.

“This failure not only hurts Nigerians — it also undermines efforts by other governments to uphold decent employments standards in the globalized economy,” Burrow declared.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

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Nigeria: Millions Lack Schooling

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`Nigeria has the highest number of children out of school’
By Ayo Okulaja [article from Next.com]

[Originally published September 22, 2010 01:43PM

In ranking Nigeria amongst the worst place for a child to be in 2010, a report by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has stated that Nigeria has more children out of education than any other country in the world.
The report claims that an astounding 8.2 million children are not provided with adequate education in Africa’s most populous country. Comparing the nation’s wealth with the apparent low standard of education, the report claims that “the report is made all the more appalling by the fact that Nigeria is far from poor, by African standards. On paper at least it is among the continent’s richest countries, the world’s sixth largest producer of crude oil. But decades of failure to invest in education have left the basic school system hardly functioning, especially in the country’s impoverished north.”
For Primary education, the report claims many students drop out of the school in their first year of education due to `unequal provision of education’ and this it argued, is caused by the lack of political will to address and arrest the issue. “A lack of political will is a major factor in the country having the highest number of children out of school in the world. Gross inequality in the provision of education has led to 8.2 million children out of primary school with many more dropping out within the first year.”
Poor attendance, imbalanced education
The report particularly criticised the northern region of the country for an abysmal amount of children denied good education. “Over half of these children are in the north of the country, with girls suffering the most with many receiving just six months of education in their lives. In the largely Muslim north of Nigeria……….attendance rates are below 50% at primary school and of those only one in every three pupils is female (nationwide, the proportion is five boys to four girls)” it noted.

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