CAMBODIA CHILD LABOR SURVEY 2001
(CCLS 2001)

INTRODUCTION

Child labour has always been a concern of ILO-IPEC and of the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC). The RGC has been actively involved in national and international activities to combat the worst forms of child labour, promote children’s education, improve living conditions of Cambodian families and to prepare and adopt laws and regulations to eliminate the exploitative forms of child labour in general, and worst forms of child labour in particular.

A significant dimension in the recent thinking about child labour is the acceptance that not all work of children is necessarily a bad thing. A recent book published by UNICEF summarizes this particular point of view. Particularly in poor, developing countries with a large rural population and few employment opportunities in modern sectors, child work may in fact be viewed as adding to children’s skills and preparing them for a livelihood in the future.

Child labour involves a loss of development possibility and is therefore a major policy concern in Cambodia. For effective policies to combat child labour, comprehensive and reliable statistics are required. With this in view, large-scale household surveys were used in Cambodia to provide broad information on the economic activities of children 5-17 or 5-14 years of age in Cambodia since 1996.

The children were involved in many different activities: fishing on a small boat, fishing on a large boat for two or three days, sometimes two or three weeks or even one or two months in a row, repairing fishing nets, peeling raw shrimp in a factory, peeling boiled shrimp and/or crabs at the sea side (hired by the wharf owner), peeling boiled shrimp or crabs at home, working at the wharf to freeze sea products coming in and carrying them to a truck for transport to a factory (“glace”) and numerous other jobs, such as steaming fish, sorting fish, etc.

Children of all ages worked in the fisheries industry: 553 children (33%) were below 13 years old, 394 children (24%) were 13 to 14 years old and 731 children (44%) were between 15 and 17 years old. The youngest children mostly worked in the fish, shrimp and crab processing business. However, some young children also worked on boats at sea: 30 children below 13 years old worked on small boats and two on large boats. Children of all ages were found as casual workers at the shrimp peeling factories.

48 % of these working children went to school, but combined it as much as possible with work. Most of them worked in fishing net repair or fish, shrimp, and crab processing (mostly peeling). Many were between 6 and 12 years old (22% of all working children).

Almost 13% of the children studied had dropped out of school, but worked only part-time. Another group of children worked full time or more than that, or worked at unpredictable times. They were unable to combine work with schooling. This group consisted of 658 children (39% of working children): 393 in Stung Hav, 197 in Tumnup Rolok and 68 in Koh Khyang. 70% of these children (485 children) were between 15 and 17 years old, although many were younger. 18% of this group (119 children) were 13 or 14 years old, and 12% (81 children) were below 13 years old.

Almost 57% of the working children did not go to school or went very irregularly (58% in Tumnup Rolok, 53% in Stung Hav and 83% in Koh Khyang). The most important reasons for not going to school were lack of money to pay school costs, having to earn money for the family and having to help work. Lack of money was the reason most often mentioned, but the three reasons were often found in combination. The fourth reason was that children did not want to go to school.