For the last 4 days, officials from several government agencies in Belize have been attending a workshop training on child labour.
The Government wants to ensure that the relevant public officers are better able to detect child labour in the workplace, and so, the Ministry of Labour sought the assistance of the United States Department of Labour.
American officials designed the workshop to prepare the Belizean officials to be able to train their colleagues in the curriculum from the US Department of Labour.
At the closing ceremony, we asked the Labour CEO to share more details on the initiative, and how it helps the participants to be better at their jobs:
Sharon Young - CEO, Ministry of Labour
"About a year ago the ministry engaged the US department of labour to discuss the issue of child labour within the broader context of the protection of children and the framework on the convention of the rights of the child and it was identified that there has been some gaps in our legislation and in our operations through the ministry and the department of labour in identifying and adjusting issues relating to child labour. So the US department of labour then committed to providing some funds through this project and identified some international partners for the Belize department of labour to work with and they provided some support for us to identify the legislation that need to be updated and modernize to reflect better protection of children and also to train our inspectors in identifying child labour."
"We thought in particular exercise what we did was to create a curriculum for our inspectorate and that curriculum can be used by any and all agencies that are involved in identifying child labour. So we had invited the various departments, education, immigration, human services, police department and also the social security board who from time to time, all these agencies collaborate to do inspections and the curriculum is tailored specifically for Belize to look at child labour issues in various sectors, whether it be agriculture, tourism, in business and so forth. So, the design of the curriculum was very comprehensive, it has been vetted by our labour department and this is the first of such training. This training in particular is training trainers."
Part of the issue in detecting child labour is that the Government officials don't yet know how widespread a problem it is in Belize. Also, the CEO told us that the Labour Act is deficient in addressing this problem. She said that these two challenges are already identified a priorities which they want to address:
Sharon Young
"The Labour Act is not specific as to activities that are not allowed. So there will be and we are in the process of defining those categories of activities that are not allowed. So this is where we are at right now. It is a very timely exercise because we found that there are significant gaps in the labour act that then now allows us to improve on those gaps so we work towards protecting children. So the labour act is really deficient in defining activities that would qualify as activities not allowed for children to engage in. We are far behind in understanding the extent to which the situation persists in the country and this will allow us to do that. We have within this project until March next year to start to collect baseline information, so we hope to be in a better position to answer those questions and we without speculating, we think that we will be getting some data very soon to help us to wrap our heads around really the extent to which and the sectors that ought to be targeted because we feel there are some sectors which we will see more engagement of children than other sectors."
The participants of the training will now go back to their colleagues in their different government agencies, where they will be training other officials on how to better detect child labour.
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