By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The fifth international Labour Organisation Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour will go ahead as planned in Durban as of today, Sunday, 15 May, and will run until 20 May.
This is the first time the global conference on the elimination of child labour will be held in Africa. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), more than 160-million children are labourers. More than a third of them are out of school.
Agriculture is said to account for the largest share of child labour worldwide.
“The time is opportune for the global community to converge on African soil to find solutions that will help our continent, in particular, to deal with the reported highest prevalence and largest number of working children,” employment & labour minister Thulas Nxesi said.
The conference will take place at the Inkosi Albert Luthuli International Convention Centre.
President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to open the conference. He will share the stage with Southern African Development Community chairperson and Malawian president Lazarus McCarthy Chakwera, ILO director-general Guy Ryder and virtually, Argentina president Alberto Ángel Fernández Pérez.
The conference will be attended by ILO constituents, international and regional organisations, civil society organisations, research institutions, foundations, individual experts and Nobel laureates.
“After the devastating natural disaster that befell KwaZulu-Natal and Durban in past weeks, it is important that we hold the conference in eThekwini as a show of support and solidarity with the people of the province and SA,” Nxesi said.
As part of that show of solidarity, the conference organisers took a decision to forego the usual social events.” The resources which could have been used for social events would be donated to flood victims, he said.
The conference will build on four previous Global Conferences, held in Buenos Aires (2017), Brasilia (2013), The Hague (2010), and Oslo (1997), which raised awareness of the issue, mobilised resources and established a strategic direction for the global movement against child labour.
This 5th conference takes place consistent with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, Target 8.7, which calls for the abolition of all forms of child labour by 2025 and the abolition of forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking by 2030.
The week-long conference brings together more than 4,000 representatives of government, trade unions, the private sector, civil society, regional and international organisations, as well as youth and children from all over the world for plenaries, presentations and side events.