Nodding toward her children and breaking stones in a quarry in the Palabek refugee camp in northern Uganda, Helen Imoo, a 32-year-old woman, says: “They have to come and work with me. There are a lot of things to pay for and life in the settlement is often not easy at all.” Her eldest son, 16 years old, nods without saying anything. The little girl, 13 years old and a little more cheerful than her brother, says: “I like coming to help my mother. She takes care of the school, the food… It is necessary for us to be here.” Stone dust floats in the air from the rocks that members of this family hit. And on the ground, the pyramids of pebbles that the stonemasons place on the sidewalk of a dirt road look piled up so that they can be seen by the trucks that circulate there, potential buyers. “It’s hard work. Our hands hurt, our backs hurt, sometimes it’s hard to breathe… But we can’t do anything else,” adds the mother.
Imoo comes from the eastern state of Equatoria, the southernmost region of South Sudan, a nation founded in 2011 and therefore the youngest in the world. But a bloody civil war that began in 2013 and the continuous clashes between the Government and rebel groups and also between different ethnicities have caused almost half of its population, some 11 million people, to be displaced within South Sudan or take refuge in countries adjacent. The peace agreements signed in 2018 They are mostly respected only in Juba, the capital, and the fear of returning to abandoned homes remains latent. “We fled in 2017. They burned houses, they shot innocent people… We decided to escape,” says Imoo.
They migrated and Uganda, south of South Sudan, was their host country. And the Palabek refugee camp, near the border and opened that same year, their new home. Your case is no exception. At the beginning of this year, around 900,000 South Sudanese still lived in Uganda, the State that welcomes the most people of this nationality. Of them, according to the latest data from UNHCRcollected in June last year, almost 70,000 live in Palabek, 60% minors.
Except for the new refugees, whose recognized needs are greater, or those who run businesses prosperous enough to not receive anything, who are the least, the vast majority of people who live in the Palabek camp receive six kilos of corn from UNHCR, half of beans and a handful of salt and cooking oil per month. Because it is insufficient, this pushes them to look for a job, an arduous task. Explains Ubaldino Andrade, local director of Salesian Missions: “They come to a completely uninhabited place, isolated from the large towns of Uganda, where you can live, build a house, but not find a job. Many are waiting, doing nothing, unable to engage in any commercial or economic activity, because here there is very little that can be done.” The missionary says that the field is like a constant experience of survival, that everything that can provide an income for a family is exploited, and that some are very hard jobs: breaking stone, producing charcoal, cutting down trees.
In Uganda, 58% of children between 5 and 11 years old work in some profession despite the fact that the law establishes the minimum age to work at 16
Imoo’s youngest daughter claims that in the quarry they can earn up to 180,000 shillings a month (about 45 euros). And that she likes mathematics and English. And that, in the future, she would like to become a nurse. A couple of kilometers away, another 13-year-old girl, MK, sits waiting for buyers for the charcoal that she, her brothers, and her mother produce. They arrived in Palabek in 2021 from the same South Sudanese region as Joyce and her family. “My older brother and I go to the forest in the morning to cut trees. When we have enough wood, we return home, where my mother waits, preparing the charcoal with the fire. Then we sell it.” Her profit: 12,000 shillings (around three euros) per day.
Poverty in Uganda makes the fight against child labor difficult. Here, 42% of the population, about 18 million peoplemust live on less than two euros a day, according to World Bank figures. The International Labor Organization (ILO) includes in a report published in February of this year that, at the beginning of 2022, almost 40% of the country’s minors (more than six million) were working, with some of the northern regions, where Palabek is located, leading the statistics. The highest level is reached among those aged 5 to 11 years, with 58% of them holding some job. All this despite the fact that the minimum age to do so, according to the Children’s Law of 2016, is 16 years old, 18 in the case of heavy jobs. “They carry out work that is mentally, physically or socially dangerous and interferes with their schooling, undermines their potential and undermines the development of society,” explains the ILO in its writing.
No schools
Among all occupations, the ILO states that the agricultural sector employs the most children, often in subsistence agriculture. An example is OB, a 12-year-old South Sudanese man on a dirt road with his cousin MA and his friend OD, 11 and 12 years old. The three carry hoes that do not exceed their height by a few centimeters. The first says that he arrived at the settlement in 2017 from the South Sudanese province of Eastern Equatoria and that he does not remember working in the fields. “Now we are going to clear the bushes to grow corn and sorghum. If we hurry, we can start planting in two days,” he explains. And he adds: “I prefer to work than go to school. This gives us food, some money to buy clothes…” His cousin interrupts: “Not me, I prefer to study. I want to be a doctor”.
South Sudan is one of the countries with the lowest educational statistics in the world. According to Unicef’s latest State of the World’s Children report, 52% of boys between 15 and 24 years old and 53% of girls are illiterate. But if the situation is complicated in their place of origin, thousands of South Sudanese children find in Palabek an almost insurmountable barrier to fulfilling their dreams: the alarming lack of schools, especially at older ages. Ubaldino Andrade explains: “There are between 15 and 19 preschool schools here, 14 primary schools and only one secondary school. Some young people access it after walking a lot, up to 20 kilometers one way and another 20 kilometers back.” This is one of the reasons to stop studying and start practicing a job, no matter how hard it may be. A picture that is repeated throughout the entire continent: UNICEF estimates that, in sub-Saharan regions, at least one in four children works.
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