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By Emeline Wuilbercq ADDIS ABABA, Oct 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Ethiopia has established a network of committees to identify children forced to work or marry during the coronavirus pandemic and to ensure that schools are safe to reopen this week, although activists fear it will be difficult to reverse the damage caused.
Yohannes Wogasso, director of the school improvement program at the Ministry of Education, said authorities realized that closing schools in March to stop the spread of COVID-19 had led to an increase in child marriage, child labor and gender violence. But he said that the reopening of schools from October 19 should help reverse the negative impacts, and children’s rights advocates highlighted the crucial role of education in fighting child labor and child marriage.
“Due to economic challenges, many parents of low socioeconomic status were forced to use child labor and this could get worse unless we reopen our schools,” Yohannes told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He said the government had established ad-hoc committees from the federal level down to the smallest administrative unit to identify marginalized and hard-to-reach children, including those already in child marriage and forced labor.
The committees would also ensure that schools operate safely even though many lack hand-washing facilities and have limited resources to make changes. About 17,000 schools, mainly in rural areas, have met the requirements and will reopen on Monday, said Yohannes, who expected all schools in Ethiopia to do so in the coming months.
Despite rapid growth in the last decade, inequality is stark in Ethiopia, where increasing numbers of children have been driven from their homes, due to poverty or neglect, and ended up begging or selling goods to survive in the streets, charities said. Approximately 16 million children between the ages of 5 and 17 are involved in child labor in Ethiopia, which has a population of about 110 million, including about 60 million people under the age of 18, according to a national survey published in 2018.
The UN agency for children, UNICEF, has said that around 40% of girls marry before the age of 18, with 15 million brides in Ethiopia, despite the government’s progress to address early marriage in the last years. Child migration specialist Girmachew Adugna from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Migration and Flight Competence Center in Addis Ababa said that attending school can help children escape child marriage.
But he said the pandemic had disrupted child-friendly reporting mechanisms, as children were unable to report abuse to teachers and community health workers, who have played a key role in supporting children, but are now focus on the COVID-19 response. Despite the reopening of schools, dropouts are likely to be considerable, as impoverished families are able to support their children working, according to Belay Hagos, director of the Institute for Educational Research at Addis Ababa University.
Students from low-income families, girls, rural students, and low-achieving students were at higher risk of staying out of school, according to a survey led by the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) team in Ethiopia. “This (reopening of schools) could curb the negative effects of the pandemic on children, but the effects will surely continue as the pandemic has affected the household economy,” Girmachew said.
