Our response in Pakistan

Pakistan has high levels of poverty, with a widening gap between urban and the poorer rural areas. In Pakistan approximately 3.5 million children are working to help support their families.

In addition to being denied access to education and other developmental opportunities, a large number of children are involved in hazardous and exploitative work such as brick kilns and the carpet weaving industry, often with little or no pay.

Carpet weaving

In the village of Mithrio Bhatti, in the desert region of Tharparkar in the South of the country, where children who participated in the Eye to Eye project live, families, who rely on agriculture to survive in an area with very little rain, often have to take loans from local money-lenders. To pay them back they are often forced to ‘bond’ their children to weave carpets. In reality the money cannot be paid back and as a continuous debt repayment the children can go on working through years of their childhood. The children either work on a loom at home or at a centre with several looms.

Unlike the agricultural sector, where children work alongside their families, child weavers are often the only members of their families who work on the looms. In some situations children are separated from their families and forced to live and work in enclosed areas with several carpet looms. Harsh punishments are often given out to any children seen by the employers to make a mistake or be inefficient, involving beating. In some cases there is sexual abuse.

TRDP’s response

To improve the lives of working young people, Save the Children supports a local organisation, Thardeep Rural Development Programme (TRDP), which works to help families avoid having to put their children to work on carpet looms. The intention is to phase out children from work and provide them with increased access to quality educational opportunities without adversely affecting the livelihoods of the carpet weaving families. It helps families by offering them loans on a fair credit system so they can afford their own loom and make weaving a sustainable family business. Recently, awareness-raising has been key for Save the Children, and the photographic project Eye to Eye, focused on child workers, was able help spread understanding of the issue.

TRDP works at village level directly with adults and children from the communities. For example, training local villagers to run part-time non-formal schooling, particularly for children who weave for part of the day. TRDP also encouraged the forming of a children’s committee in the village to help gradually teach young people about community and family responsibility and about dealing with finance. In the older generation many are not used to dealing with cash, as a barter economy with subsistence farming was the traditional system historically in the region.

The majority of school age children do not attend school, and girls particularly miss out. In many families schooling is not seen as appropriate for girls, who still marry very young and are generally expected to be based at home until that time. TRDP is working with the elders to encourage change in this area, and many of the Eye to Eye children expressed their own hopes: “I want to become a teacher so I can teach girls in the village, as at the moment there is no female teacher.” Thankfully since the workshops in 2006, the first non-formal school lessons for girls have begun and the numbers are growing.

TRDP growing in strength

TRDP is a large and respected organisation, which has been working in Tharparkar since an emergency drought in the early 1980s in which Save the Children took the lead. As the need continued after this time, TRDP grew out of Save the Children to become an independent organisation. Their work continues to link up the protection of children with bigger local issues like securing long-term water supply. TRDP is expanding and has been focussing on child labour as one of its areas of work for many years now. It’s growth and effectiveness led recently to further financial support from the UK charity Comic Relief.

Within the region TRDP battles on for the rights of children and the poorer, often exploited, communities in which it works. The ‘middle-men’ or moneylenders make good profit from the child work, whilst TRDP wants a fair deal for families and freedom for children. A worker explains: “At first they just saw our intervention into family debt as an opportunity to go to other families and exploit them instead. Now they know we are serious about challenging the child labour that they encourage and they actively resist and openly criticise us. But we keep going. We have just set up our own local outlet for carpets that have been made on family-owned looms and bought from the families at a fair price.”