Stakeholders in promoting public private partnership on education says private sector organizations has a great role to contribute in the development of this country in as far as eliminating child labour is concern.
The coalition says this is possible if the country can priotize in support of education through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) investment.
Speaking at a breakfast meeting on Tuesday organized by Empoyers Consultative Association of Malawi in Blantyre, chairperson of civil society education coalition, Limbani Nsapato said as a country we are on crisis as over 2 million children are involved into child labour but with the strong efforts from private sector in investing into CSR activities that target education, as a country we can be able to eliminate the vice.
He said through the introduction of different education programs, as well as discouraging their work premises from child labourers, as a country we can fight the battle.
Nsapato further said child labour is still a burden in this country mostly because of poverty as parents and guardians always prefer sending a child to do a certain business or work with a certain entity just to get money.
“But also there are some of the barries that put children out of school and get involved into child labour, including shortage of infrastructure in most of our schools, lack of teaching and learning materials, and others are failling to persue tertiary education because of fees, so these challenge are making it difficult for many children to remain in school,” Nsapato said.
On his part Executive Director at ECAM, George Khaki, says as an association which looks into issues of labour, employement as well as child labour, they have a role in coordinating all players in the industry by making sure that within there scope they are also priotizing the elements of eliminating child labour.
“There are other companies that are directly supporting the schools, others are working with the educational institutions and others are supporting through bursary to need students, all these with efforts to eliminate child labour,” Khaki said.
He also conquered with Nsapato by saying that the major reason of child labour is poverty which has also recently deepen because of the economic crisis the country is facing including different catastrophes, but as industry players and other stakeholders there is need for more efforts in coming up with activities as well policies that can uplift the economic well being of Malawians at large and that can help the fight.
