I. Legal Framework

Child Labor Laws

In Perú, the legal minimum age of employment is 14; however, children between 12 and 14 may obtain permission from the Ministry of Labor to work four hours a day in light work. Adolescents aged 15-17 may work for six hours a day provided they are attending school regularly. In more hazardous sectors, such as mining, the legal minimum work age is 15. Work that can harm a child’s physical, mental, or emotional health and development, including underground work, heavy lifting/carrying, and work that interferes with school attendance is prohibited under the age of 18.

Education Laws and Structure

In 1993, the Peruvian Congress extended the years of obligatory schooling to 13: three pre-school years (starting at age three) and a total of 10 years of primary and secondary school, to be phased in progressively. In order to phase in the additional years, it was planned to add one school year, each calendar year, over several years.

As part of the national education reform, the Ministry of Education has developed a model that moves away from teaching/instruction and puts emphasis on learning/training. It involves:

• A curriculum that takes local realities (including multiculturalism) into account.

• Flexibility for one third of the curriculum to be developed locally.

• An emphasis on solving concrete problems of every day life and improving the quality of life.

In the short run, the new approach will focus on factors affecting educational quality such as teacher training; production and distribution of free educational materials; expansion, improvement and maintenance of infrastructure; school director training, and social support programs such as distribution of food, furniture, and clothing.

In the medium run, the goal will be to expand the coverage of the education system (especially in the pre-school and secondary areas) in disperse rural areas, and to improve teaching methodology.

Goals in alternative education include modification of the primary and secondary curricula to be appropriate for the adolescent/adult population, a flexible, contextual, competency-based, modular curriculum, radio learning, day-care programs, supplemental nutrition programs, and the establishment of an accreditation system for technical education.

II. Extent and Nature of Child Labor

Statistics

• According to the Yearbook of Labor Statistics, in 1999, 5.5 percent of children in Perú between the ages of 10 and 14 and 44 percent of children between the ages of 15-19 were working (ILO, Geneva, 2000, Table 1A).

• On tests conducted by the Ministry of Education in 1998, of 25 departments, the Department of Puno (location of the proposed projects) was among the six with the lowest scores on three of the four tests.

• In most rural schools in Perú, class contact hours are inadequate (an estimated 200 hours/year compared with an average 1,050 hours/year for Latin America), many students are over-age for their grade, and there are high levels of absenteeism, repetition and dropout.

Type of work in which children are engaged 

The worst forms of child labor in Perú have not been formally identified, but children are most commonly found working in the agricultural sector, in garbage scavenging, in the loading and unloading of produce in markets, in fireworks factories, in urban centers working as shoe shiners, and in stone quarries. Working children and adolescents are also found making bricks, participating in informal mining-related activities, and being commercially exploited and exploited for sexual means.

III. Efforts

Government

The Ministry of Labor implements the Projoven (Proyouth) Program which helps low income youth enter the labor market through training and apprenticeship programs. The program, begun in 1996, has trained almost 25,000 youths in such technical areas as sewing/tailoring, administration, tourism, mechanics, carpentry, construction, bread making, shoe repair, agro-industry, and fishing.

The Ministry of Education has developed the Intercultural Bilingual Education Program to provide universal access to quality education, and nearly 5,000 teachers are being trained to address close to 100,000 students in eight languages. The Ministry of Education’s Plan Huascarán will provide Internet access to all schools including rural schools.

PROMUDEH is promoting a new initiative, Plan de Acción para la Infancia 2002 - 2006. The plan will include efforts to protect child workers with a goal of the eventual elimination of child labor.

The National Plan to Eliminate Child Labor, developed by the Comité Nacional para la Erradicación del Trabajo Infantil y Protección de Adolescentes que Trabajan (National Committee for the Eradication of Child Labor and the Protection of Working Adolescents), has not yet been approved. In 2001, the Committee set up a number of sector sub-committees, including one on mining and one on education. The Committee has since become inactive, but the sub-committees continue to function and the sub-committee on mining has successfully brought the issue of child labor in the mining sector to national attention. Its members have formed a separate entity, the Red de Minería Artesanal (the Small-scale Mining Network) which has developed its own one-year action plan.

Ministerio de Promoción de la Mujer y Desarrollo Humano (PROMUDEH - Ministry for the Promotion of Women and Human Development). Through the National Institute of Family Well-being, PROMUDEH addresses populations at risk, such as children, adolescents, women and older adults living in poverty. PROMUDEH’s Educadores de Calle Program (Street Educators) is made up of a team of young professionals who attend to at-risk populations, among them working children, to reintegrate them into family, school, and community.

International Donors

Through CARE, USAID began to work in education with the objective of improving opportunities for rural girls. Important accomplishments were raising social awareness, building a national network for girls’ education called FLORECER, and passing a girls’ education law. In 2002, USAID will implement pilot programs with new approaches to rural education, and in 2003, the World Bank will adapt lessons learned from the pilot projects to the remaining rural areas.

The International Labor Organization’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor is implementing the USDOL-funded Program to Prevent and Progressively Eliminate Child Labor in Small-scale Traditional Gold Mining in Bolivia, Ecuador and Perú (referred to in this solicitation). In Perú, the project is working in Mollehuaca, Puno and Santa Filomena, focusing on awareness raising, institutional strengthening, education improvement, and withdrawal of children from mining.

UNICEF’s program for 2001-2005 focuses on extremely poor and excluded children with a goal of equitable and inclusive public policies. Two programs have been developed:

1) The Initiatives for Social Inclusion Program operates at the local level and emphasizes equitable access to health care, especially in early childhood; quality education; exercise of citizenship; and adolescent participation.

2) The Promotion and Monitoring of Rights Program, at the national level, strengthens access to information and knowledge through three national projects.

UNICEF also implements the USAID-funded Abriendo Puertas (Opening Doors to Rural Girls’ Education), a project initiated in 1999 to address the issues of rights, gender equality, bilingual/intercultural education and citizenship.

Private Sector

During the 1990s a "Law to Promote Investment in Education" (Legislative Decree 882) served as the legal framework to promote private sector support for education. The Ministry of Education has signed contracts with a number of large private corporations/companies and there is an increasing amount of private and municipal participation in education.

Generally, Peruvians invest a high level of personal income in education (Perúvian Education at the Crossroads: Challenges and Opportunities for the 21st Century, World Bank, 2001). One community that is part of the USDOL/ILAB South America Small-scale Mining Project has conducted a fundraiser for school improvement, and members of another community have provided the labor to construct new classrooms. These investments reflect a national commitment to education as the path to development. Another positive sign for sustainability of interventions in Perú are nascent private sector (BellSouth) contributions for education programs and scholarships.

International NGOs in Perú

CARE-Perú, through the USAID project Nuevos Horizontes para la Educación de las Niñas (New Horizons for Girls’ Education), organized the National Network for Girls Education and achieved congressional approval for the Law to Promote Education for Rural Girls. The law mandated universal school enrollment for rural girls; gender equity in teaching, infrastructure, and school management; and training for girls and families on psychosocial and reproductive health.

Save the Children (SAVE) has also implemented various studies involving education and child labor. In addition, School Municipality is a SAVE project in which children and adolescents participate democratically in school, and Parent School is a community school that helps raise parent awareness on child and human rights.

SAVE also works to integrate the goals of the Municipal Child and Adolescent Defense Offices (DEMUNA) with communities. These offices protect and promote the rights of children and adolescents, solve conflicts through conciliation, and promote strengthening of the family.

National NGOs in Perú

AIDECA offers technical improvements to eliminate the need for child labor in the USDOL/ILAB South America Small-scale Mining Project in Mollehuaca.

Centro Proceso Social (Social Process Center) is an organization in Lima working to help child trash pickers in the northern cone of Lima. The project has developed an approach for reinserting trash-picking children in school by using social educators to help with academic reinforcement and to conduct consciousness raising for parents.

Centro de Estudios Sociales y Publicaciones (CESIP), Programa Derechos de Niños y Adolescentes (Social Studies and Publications Center, Program on Children’s and Adolescents’ Rights). CESIP’s mission is to reduce social inequality and inequity stemming from factors of gender, age, social class, and ethnic origin. CESIP has implemented part of the USDOL/ILAB South America Small-scale Mining Project in Mollehuaca with interventions covering such issues as school furniture, teacher training, and development of didactic material. Other CESIP programs address the prevention of child/adolescent labor through: school participation; child labor awareness raising with kids, teachers, parents groups, and community; improvement of educational quality through extracurricular activities; Saturday schools; and alternative income generation programs.

In a program for Bell South, CESIP developed a mochila escolar (school bag) initiative called PRO NIÑO (Pro-Child) which supplies materials and resources to a selected group of children. The program’s aim is to reintegrate children who have left school or to support those at risk of failing. The program includes a revolving fund for mothers of target children in exchange for reducing work hours or removing children from work and reenrolling them in school.

A new program Beca Semilla (Seed scholarship), also sponsored by Bell South, reinforces the participation of adolescents, promoting technical skills to enable participants to make occupational changes and leave the worst forms of work.

Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Educación (Center for Education Research and Development) specializes in development research/publication and teaching innovations.

Confederación Nacional de Instituciones Empresariales Privadas (CONFIEP - National Confederation of Private Business Institutions). A special committee within this organization convened to look at social conscience issues and eventually became "Perú 2021." It is now an independent organization that serves as a model for involving the private sector in eradication of child labor.

Cooperacción (Cooperation) is the NGO responsible for the USDOL/ILAB South America Small-scale Mining Project in Santa Filomena, Perú, where its representatives have focused on education and health as the most important elements in helping children attend and remain in school.

Cooperacción has been successful in improving the quality of teaching. Before the intervention of the USDOL/ILAB South America Small-scale Mining Project, no high school existed and only 45 percent of children in the community attended school. Now, with the addition of a high school, 85 percent of children attend. Also in Santa Filomena, the high school and health posts constructed by the community have been adopted and taken over by the state. Cooperacción used diagnostics and study results to leverage requests for support to regional government offices.

In Santa Filomena, Cooperacción has incorporated local topics into the curriculum and developed a one-day per month "school for parents" that sensitizes parents to child labor issues. Cooperacción has also taken advantage of "Seguro Escolar" (School Insurance), a program that provides health services to children up to age 17 if teachers verify they are attending school classes.

Foro Educativo (Education Forum) is an education think tank that generates applications through participative processes, then seeks to create consensus on the ideas to influence educational policy.

EDUCA, Instituto de Fomento de una Educación de Calidad (Institution for the Promotion of Quality Education). EDUCA’s mission is the improvement of educational quality through creative approaches. EDUCA is an organization of teachers and other professionals committed to training other teachers and communities in how to transform institutions and practice to create Peruvian entrepreneurs.

Grupo de Iniciativa Nacional por los Derechos del Niño (GIN - National Initiative Group for Children’s Rights) is a network of 30 institutions, formed in the 1980s, to work in favor of children’s rights. GIN performs follow-up on the implementation of the Convenio de los Derechos del Niño (Convention on the Rights of the Child) and conducts awareness raising campaigns against child labor.

Red por un Futuro sin Trabajo Infantil. (Network for a Future without Child Labor). This network includes fifteen institutions working on the eradication of child labor.

Red Titicaca, Instituto de Educación y Comunicación Puno (Titicaca Network, Education and Communication Institute, Puno) is implementing the DOL/ ILAB South America Small-scale Mining Project in Puno. Its approach involves the entire community, including parents, leaders, authorities, and teachers. It emphasizes working with teachers who are discouraged and unmotivated. Workshops have improved the teachers’ commitment and additional training is planned for the coming year. Awareness raising with parents increased their motivation to work for education and as a result they provided the labor for the construction of six classrooms.

Sindicato Unitario de Trabajadores en la Educación del Perú (SUTEP - Peruvian Teachers Union). Only 10,000 of Perú’s public school teachers are not members of SUTEP, a union that counts 295,000 public school teachers in its membership. SUTEP has worked through the ILO using promoters to raise awareness on the eradication of child labor.

Tarea (Task) specializes in improving public education through policy, local development, and awareness raising.

Warma Tarinakuy developed a project in 1996 in a red-light district of Lima where children worked in the streets, semi-abandoned by their working parents. The project attempted to fill gaps in the continuity of schooling through non-formal education. Warma Tarinakuy also works with the children of gang members, on issues including cultural identity, self-confidence, and capacity building.