source: www.executive-magazine.com

Author: Zak Brophy

In an alleyway corner in an impoverished Beirut district, a small group of youngsters gather. Nearby, barefoot infants play in wastewater falling from a drain, and a maze of loose electricity cables haphazardly zigzag overhead. While thousands of their peers across the country are sitting in classrooms, these children-cum-adolescents are typical of many from their neighborhood and have long since left education for a life of work.

“The situation at home was difficult and I didn’t think school would help me find a job in the future, so I decided it was better to go and work than to stay in school,” says Haydar, a 15 year old from the area. He dropped out of school when he was 12 and has since been working full-time in a number of different jobs.

Beside Haydar stand two of his friends who have also forgone any formal education in their youth so as to get to work and start earning as soon as possible: a boy who works in an aluminum workshop and a young girl who packs rat poison into little plastic bags. All of the youngsters, who are between 12 and 15 years old, work at least eight hours a day, often closer to 10, and receive around LL50,000 ($33.33) to LL75,000 ($50) for their services for a six-day work week.

The 12-year-old aluminum worker, Ahmad, is illiterate and never expected, nor desired, an education. “None of my three brothers ever really went to school, and I didn’t like it. The teachers weren’t good to us. We all try to get work when we can, which is the way it is for most of us around here,” he explains. Much lip service has been paid to decrying the problem of child labor and its increasing prevalence in Lebanon, but to date very little has actually been done to tackle it.

There are no accurate statistics on this issue, but between 2005 and 2006 the child labor unit at the Ministry of Labor (MoL) said there were around 100,000 youngsters engaged in child labor; it has since updated this estimate to 180,000. However, the unit’s head, Nazha Shallita, concedes that in reality the number is probably significantly higher, “with the effect of the war in Syria and the general declining economic situation.”

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