Tamil Nadu, India. Mat McDermott/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Organisations of working children have been active in Latin America since the late 1970s and in Africa and Asia since the late 1980s. These grassroots organisations provide support to their members by offering training and leisure activities, mutual assistance, and networking opportunities. They also communicate their members’ demands to local authorities in order to improve working children’s living conditions. The African Movement of Working Children and Youth, for instance, cites the acquisition of a classroom for literacy classes, lowered health costs at a local clinic, and settlements with the police so that street vendors can work in security as concrete results of their lobbying activities at the local level. In India, working children united in Bhima Sangha, a union of working children, were instrumental in setting up the first local children’s councils in the state of Karnataka.
In some countries working children’s organisations also engage in collective political action at the national level. These advocacy efforts are often directed at changing existing or newly proposed child labour policies and legislation, which almost exclusively focus on the prohibition of child work. Such protest and lobbying activities have met with some success at the national level, particularly in Bolivia. The Code for Children and Adolescents (2014), which has been drafted with direct input from the Bolivian Union of Working Children and Adolescents (UNATSBO), contains provisions that protect working children from exploitation and the abuse of power while at the same time enabling them to work under ‘decent conditions’.
