Coffee farmers reject new rule

Autumn in East Africa is when two of the region's primary agricultural crops, coffee beans and tea leaves, are harvested. These crops bring enormous profits to the companies that own the plantations and help ensure some level of economic stability to the governments of the host countries.

But East Africa is also rife with grinding poverty; not primarily a poverty of financial resources, but a poverty of options, that prevents people from conceiving a better life and developing their full potential. There are also serious health problems, notably a rapidly increasing number of HIV/AIDS orphans. Finally, there is a tradition of rural family units that have practiced a hand-to-mouth existence for as long as anyone can remember. These realities of rural life provide many of the ingredients that spawn and perpetuate child labor.

Autumn, therefore, is the time when poor, hungry children, already working on plantations, alone or next to their parents, labor longer hours for a few extra shillings. It is a time when children fortunate enough to be in school are tempted, or urged by their parents, to drop out and earn a little something extra for the family. Many never return to the classroom. The reasons are clear to primary school teachers like James Wachira:

"When the peak season arises, [parents] want their children to come and help with the coffee-picking so that they can earn a little bit of money. Some parents are illiterate, so they do not know the importance of education, and that is why they encourage these children to pick to raise something for the housekeeping."

The reasons for child labor may be as numerous as the plantations that spread across the fertile uplands, but the result has always been the same. The cycle of child labor in the agricultural sector of East Africa has remained as constant as the annual monsoon rains that sustain all living things in the region.

This paper highlights aspects of one particular program that is helping to stem the tide of hazardous child labor in Kenya's agricultural sector. The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's East Africa Plantation Pilot Project, working with the Kenyan (CENTRAL) Organization of Trade Unions (COTU-K) and the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union (KPAWU), trains local and national union members, as well as parents, teachers, employers and others, in the hazards of child labor and the importance of education. Working through the union structure, the project identifies children working on coffee, tea and sisal plantations, and helps them to return to school and continue their education. The project establishes regional child labor committees and also works with local communities to create self-help groups, income-generating schemes, and small loan programs to enable families to survive and keep their children in school. Some aspects of this program are highlighted here as best practices in the hope that they can be replicated by trade unions in other countries.

The Environment

In Kenya, where half the population is under 18 years of age, many do not go to school or attend only part time. More than three million children aged 6-14 work, a large percentage of them in the potentially hazardous agricultural sector, and children constitute some 20 to 30 per cent of the casual labor force. It is estimated that most of the children tend to work on smaller estates and family owned farms, while most children associated with the large tea estates are working as domestic servants for tea workers.

On the Kenya coffee plantations during the peak harvest season, as many as 30 per cent of the coffee pickers are under 15 years of age. By one estimate, children comprise 58 percent of the coffee plantation workforce during peak seasons, and 18 percent of the workforce during the rest of the year. Many families believe that sending their children to work or keeping them at home to take care of younger siblings while one or both of the parents work is of greater benefit than sending them to school. The payment structure of the plantation system also encourages families to bring their children to work because workers' are paid a piece rate rather than an hourly or daily wage. Under this system, the more one can pick, the more money one earns. Given the inability of families to pay for schooling, the large size of poor families, and the lack of day care, children often end up working in order to help their parents increase the meager family income.

Schooling in Kenya was free until 1982, when the government cut spending on education to repay loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Until the new government passed an ordinance in December 2002 abolishing school fees, parents had to share much of the cost of educating their children. While the government pays teachers' salaries, parents must come up with money for their children's books, school supplies, exam fees, some tuition fees, uniforms, extracurricular activities, building maintenance fees, food, etc. With so many parents unable to pay, school enrollment rates dropped over the last two decades-from nearly 90 percent to less than 50 percent in some regions.

Levels of education for boys and girls differ greatly. Although the number of boys and girls in school is roughly equal in the first few years of primary school, some boys start to drop out to work in the fields during these early years. However, boys substantially outnumber girls in higher education. Rural families are particularly reluctant to invest in educating girls, especially at the higher levels. Seventy percent of illiterate persons in the country are female. Girls also drop out of school in order to marry or take care of younger siblings.

As a result of a new government elected in Kenya in December 2002, new policies affecting child labor and education are being enacted. One of the first acts of the new president was to abolish primary school fees, previously an enormous impediment to school enrollment and retention. It is not clear, however, whether the new government will reinstitute a desperately needed school meals program for the children. Many poor children attending school are unable to stay awake or concentrate on school work because they are hungry, and only able to afford one meal a day. A nutritious school meal program, once the norm in Kenyan public schools, is an important element in attracting and retaining children in school, as well as allowing them to learn and to engage in school activities more effectively.

"It is not fair for a child to have to abandon school to go and work to support the family. Why don't the parents work and support the family and let children go to school? In these cases, the family is not operating properly - that family should be helped to operate properly. Some argue that in many situations the pay for adult work is very low and that's why the children work. I think the government should intervene and provide assistance. The adults should be paid decent salaries so they would not be tempted to exploit the labor of children."

Children working in the coffee, tea and sisal plantations often wake before sunrise, perform household chores and have a cup of hot tea for breakfast, before walking from their homes to the plantations. Depending on whether the children live on the plantation or in shanty towns surrounding the farms, they can have a long walk - six days a week - in rain, cold, or sunshine, in order to start work by 7:00am or 8:00am. They have no breaks, are not allowed to talk to others, and rarely have time to eat. On the coffee farms, the children pick the red coffee berries. On the vast tea plantations that blanket the Kenyan landscape, the little children's heads are barely visible while they move as quickly as possible to pick the tea leaves.

The work is physically demanding, requiring bending, kneeling, climbing ladders, and carrying heavy bags or buckets. In addition to these traditional chores, children also weed and cultivate the soil, fix irrigation canals, and apply dangerous pesticides. They often use dangerous tools and sometimes run unsafe farm machinery they don't know how to operate.

Many activities, like carrying heavy and oversized loads, result in permanent disabilities and injuries. Fatigue is an ever-present problem because children can work 8-12 hours, and children as young as six years old work in the fields beside their parents during the harvest season. Because they are outside all day, these children are particularly susceptible to heat exhaustion, disease-carrying insects, and illnesses caused by unsanitary drinking water.

Benta A. is all too familiar with the poisonous chemicals sprayed on crops to keep pests away. On Saturdays, when she is not in school, Benta reports to the coffee fields by 7:00 a.m. There, she earns less than $1 for 10 hours of work.

"It's not good," says Benta, a fifth-grader at the Kia-ora Primary School in the Ruiru District. "I don't like it at all because your hands are very painful. The chemicals that are applied burn your face as if hot water has been poured on your face."

Exposure to pesticides puts children like Benta at greater risk of developing skin irritations, breathing difficulties, and long-term health problems, including cancer. Young pickers also suffer from snakebites, back strain, and other injuries.

The official minimum age for work in Kenya is 16; however, the law does not apply to the agricultural sector, where approximately 70 percent of the labor force is employed. Ministry of Labor officers nominally enforce the minimum age statute, and the Government makes some effort to eliminate child labor, primarily working with the ILO's International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor. A number of NGOs and trade unions have ongoing programs aimed at the elimination of child labor, including the teachers' union (Kenya National Union of Teachers - KNUT), the Undugu Society, and the Africa Network for the Prevention and Protection Against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCN), to name but a few. Kenya ratified ILO Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labor in May 2001 and ILO Convention 138 on the minimum age for work in 1979.

The Program

In April 1999, the AFL-CIO American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center) regional office in Nairobi began a four-year child labor pilot project with approximately $362,000 from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID). The project operated in 11 target areas located in nine districts in Kenya, as well as one in Uganda, and one in Tanzania. In addition, approximately $11,000 was made available from the Maida Springer Kemp Fund to assist some of the most needy cases, including AIDs orphans. The project's ambitious goals included changing attitudes towards child labor at the village level and stemming the tide of children going to work rather than to school. The Solidarity Center had been working in the area since 1995, primarily with the 110,000-member Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers' Union to teach them action-oriented planning, negotiating and bargaining skills with the goal of increasing union membership.

Before the program began, union leaders did not bother to deal with child labor issues, although it was increasingly clear that families in rural areas were finding it difficult to survive due to unemployment, poor wages and lack of options available to them for keeping their children in school and supporting themselves. These families were both current and potential members of KPAWU. Clear information on child labor issues or alternatives to child labor was not readily available. In any case, most unions believed that child labor had little or nothing to do with union issues except that those under 18 years of age could not join the union.

As a result of the project, the union leaders and their rank and file became aware that child labor was not wanted by their members, was hindering economic development in rural areas and could be dealt with through a union-led program. Leaders became aware that activists, particularly women, can recruit workers into the union while eliminating child labor because returning children to school directly benefits poor families working in agriculture. The East Africa Plantation Pilot Project would take many of the skills, improvements in knowledge, and experiences gained by the Solidarity Center in working with local trade unions and employ them, with appropriate modifications, in the cause of breaking the cycle of child labor.

The Process

Successful child labor projects mobilize a broad alliance of partners practicing interventions at the local level. The Solidarity Center's East Africa Plantation Pilot Project followed this model. The aims of the project were to: 1) create a community-based approach to monitoring, awareness raising, and the withdrawal of children from work; 2) reduce child labor abuses, and 3) create an anti-child labor culture among adult union members and their families.

The process for accomplishing these goals was multi-faceted and flexible. However, there was a clear vision of how to structure a sustainable grass roots project supported by all the stakeholders. Briefly, the project first held training workshops at regional and national levels to educate high-level stakeholders, such as government officials, union leaders, employers, international organizations and others, about child labor and to encourage their participation. Obtaining the buy-in of the leadership paved the way for the Solidarity Center to work with representatives of unions and government at district, village and estate levels.

The Solidarity Center, together with COTU-K and KPAWU, then held several training workshops at district, village and estate levels to develop clear plans of action for educating and engaging local community members. These training sessions, like the trainer workshops, had specific goals in mind. For example, the Solidarity Center was able to create child labor committees composed of diverse local leaders, to administer local activities. As a result of the local level workshops, workers, teachers, estate managers, union representatives, social workers, and parents all learned to work together to discuss child labor, its causes and consequences, and jointly create precise, realistic action plans for community awareness, identifying working children and returning them to school. With a focus on the elimination of child labor, participants set their own priorities and developed their own strategic plans to deal with the underlying causes of child labor and poverty. When regular follow-up sessions were added, the result was real community-based commitment to the project. The CCLCs, in their various stages of development, continue to display a high degree of commitment and enthusiasm.

The local community members participating in the workshops were taught to identify conflicts and ideas for working with families to help them send their children back to school. These strategies included setting up community based self-help groups, revolving micro-credit societies to help out the most needy children and their families, and ideas for income generating schemes. Participants also discussed how to teach simple money management so families could better budget for education - as well as negotiate with teachers to be able to pay fees on a sliding scale over the course of the school year. Finally, during the 90 day implementation plans, local union representatives frequently went door to door to discuss child labor and education with families, held community meetings to discuss solutions and, where necessary, served as mediators between families and teachers and employers. This alone helped to begin changing an unbalanced power structure in the community by teaching parents to work with people in authority on a more equal basis.

Every quarter, following the end of the 90 day action plans, Solidarity Center staff and workshop trainers from the trade unions traveled to the remote rural areas to meet the Child Labor Committees, teachers, parents, etc., discuss their accomplishments and their roadblocks, and create new and revised plans based upon lessons learned. In some cases, additional follow-up workshops were held, to enable the participants to regroup and develop new plans. In most cases, union representatives and child labor committees were able to provide detailed documentation on each working child, their school history and their return to school, as well as information on the work of each of the local community groups established following the training seminars. All participants reported feeling greatly empowered as a result of their training and the continued support given by Solidarity Center and trade union staff, and found themselves emboldened and proud to be able to make a real contribution to the lives of their community and their children.

The project also took a more strategic approach than just removing children from work and returning them to school. It sought a fundamental cultural change within the community by transforming its traditional views of childhood and child labor. The project taught that any work that deprives children of the right to a childhood is harmful child labor. The project also sought to establish among parents and community leaders a shared belief in the value of education. Only after the core values are understood and accepted can a community begin to develop creative ways to make sure that its children are protected from abusive child labor practices and given every opportunity to attend school. Almost every aspect and activity of the project was based on raising awareness before developing specific programs geared to returning children to school.

In addition, families were made aware of practical ways of reducing poverty and increasing family well being. Many of these efforts dealt with making the best use of family incomes, the establishment of micro-finance groups, self-help groups, income generating activities and bursary schemes. These activities were included to help families cope with the loss of income, however meager, experienced when their children no longer worked on the plantations. The Solidarity Center believes that making a direct financial intervention to return children to school should be used only as a last resort.

By insisting on local ownership and development, the project built a solid foundation on which to grow. It also generated a number of "best practices" which can be modeled and replicated in other areas by sound, motivated, well organized and financially disciplined groups which have already identified a real need.

Finally, to help extremely needy children return to school, the child labor committees have used small direct cash donations (usually $10 - $15) from the Maida Springer Kemp Fund. The Solidarity Center administers this small charitable fund - named after a distinguished African-American labor and civil rights leader known for her work in Africa in the 1960s supporting African trade unions as an international representative of the AFL-CIO - to help nearly 1000 children obtain uniforms, books, and other necessities. The Maida Fund also encourages locally based employers and religious organizations to assist the work of the child labor committees by developing their own means of providing direct assistance to needy children.

Initial results of the pilot project can be measured quantitatively and qualitatively. The following statistics give a glimpse of how many people were reached in a relatively short period of time. The best practices mentioned in this paper provide a window into some of the qualitative changes resulting from the pilot project.

Starting in 1999 with policy and trainers' workshops on child labor and strategic planning in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, the project trained 1,500 participants in 63 three-day workshops to establish and work with child labor committees in agricultural areas. Making use of chiefs' "barazas" (village meetings), union meetings, rallies and other gatherings, the Solidarity Center office in Nairobi estimates that the extension work of the 1,500 participants reached well over 100,000 East Africans with a significant child labor message. Individuals and groups related to the child labor committees have become committed to the eradication of child labor because they have been provided with relevant information, along with planning and motivational skills. The spreading of this information continues, along with HIV/AIDS awareness creation.

By December 2002, the Solidarity Center estimates that at least 1,563 working children had returned to school, with a retention rate of over 80%. It is also estimated that the project was responsible for keeping a larger number of children in school and out of the illegal workforce.

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Coffee farmers in Nyeri have rejected the new Government directives stopping them from directly selecting a miller.

Nyeri farmers have vowed to oppose the guidelines that have transferred voting rights to Cooperative officials.

The directive by the Ministry of Co-operatives says the co-operative societies management committees will be choosing the miller on behalf of farmers. The guidelines are contained in a circular dated August 14 and signed by the Commissioner of Co-operatives, Mr Fredrick Odhiambo.

Reacting to the news, the farmers accused the government of attempting to favour a particular miller through the directive.

"These guidelines are only tailored to suit a particular miller, they know that it would be easy to corrupt the officials and get the tenders to mill but we will resist this," said Mr Charles Wachira.

During a workshop in Karatina, the angry farmers vowed not to cede their powers to society officials who, they claimed, could easily be corrupted.

The farmers complained that the development would allow corruption in the sector, with millers bribing the society officials to get contracts. They received with hostility the directive read to them by the Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK) at the weekend.

The farmers further claimed the government could use the new development to protect the interests of a particular miller.

However, the Government argues that the new rules are meant to safeguard the interest of farmers and other service providers in the industry.

The circular reads in part: "The appointment of coffee millers and marketing agents shall be made annually by members of the management committees of the societies in their capacities as the governing authorities."

Mathira MP Mr Nderitu Gachagua supported the farmers, saying the rule went against the Coffee Amendment Act of 2001 that vests powers on the Annual General Meetings as the supreme body to make decisions like choosing a miller.

"It is the AGM that is recognised under the Act and so all these circulars can only be subordinate to the Act. There is no way you can take away that power from the people unless you want chaos in the industry," warned Gachagua.

Gachagua, who is also a member of the Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture, said that his committee was yet to see the rule. Farmers have been electing their miller and marketing at the AGM through a vote.

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