Children’s work in the livestock sector: Herding and beyond

4.2.2 National governments
National governments and their government bodies
are important stakeholders responsible for dealing
with child labour issues at the national level and
creating and enforcing national legislation that
contributes to child labour elimination, as well as
providing policies and infrastructure that address
its root causes. Such efforts should include close
collaboration with different actors (including
within government, but also producers’, workers’
and employers’ organizations, development
partners, researchers and international labour and
agriculture organizations) and should ideally include
participation of those directly concerned: children,
parents, communities and teachers. In the case of
(nomadic) pastoralist communities practising child
labour in livestock production, local pastoralists
(and their networks) should ideally be included in
government endeavours to eliminate child labour
in the livestock sector. In general, important
recommendations for national governments are as
follows:
Strengthen the legal and political framework for
the reduction of child labour in the livestock
sector:
Undertake and support research on child labour
in the livestock sector, including systematic
data collection and interpretation within
national surveys and censuses, in order to
develop adequate policy, legal and institutional
frameworks to eliminate child labour in the
livestock sector.
Integrate approaches to end child labour in the
livestock sector into national poverty alleviation,
socio-economic and agriculture- and ruraldevelopment-related
strategies, policies and
programmes.
Install effective mechanisms for the
implementation and application of protective
legislation for children working with livestock.
This includes setting up proper enforcement
policies and monitoring systems.
Include in national lists of hazardous work (in line
with ILO conventions) tasks that children under
18 should not undertake with regard to livestock.
Create an enabling environment for the sustainable
reduction of child labour:
Foster integrated area approaches that combine
awareness raising on child labour in livestock
with livelihood diversification and incomegeneration
approaches, Community-Based
Monitoring Systems, education services and
infrastructure development targeted at reducing
child labour (e.g. safe potable water close to
homesteads and schools, and natural resource
management such as fuel-saving stoves and
sustainable community forestry for biofuels).
Reduce vulnerability to risk and extend coverage
of social protection to agriculture, the selfemployed
and migrant communities.
Promote decent youth employment, identifying
and promoting non-hazardous work for children
of legal working age.
Identify substitutes for hazardous substances,
technologies and practices in livestock
production, improving working conditions in the
sector for all workers.
Support the modernization of farm technologies
and the use of innovative agricultural practices
in order to reduce labour (intensity) for the
household and for children in particular.
Create an enabling policy and institutional
environment for small-scale livestock producers’
sustainable livestock and range management.
Promote participation:
Create an enabling environment for producer
organizations and other livestock stakeholders to
be actively involved in policy and programming
processes at all levels, including through the
creating/strengthening of multistakeholder
platforms in order to rebalance the power
relations between different stakeholders.
Encourage pastoralists to strengthen and form
their own organizations to be represented in
national policy processes and actions relevant to
the future of their children.
Contribute to efforts (awareness raising
and campaigning, especially within rural
communities) aimed at changing attitudes
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