Child labour kills

The Moroccan National Institution for Solidarity with Women in Crisis, known by its French acronym INSAF, has launched a campaign against child labour. The slogan is CHILD LABOUR KILLS - IT KILLS THEIR CHILDHOOD

“We would like to paste our posters on the M'dina buses. The Casablanca bus company has given us its assent; we are just waiting for sponsors,” said Meriem Othmani, the president of the INSAF.

Set up in 1999, INSAF is a non profit association, comprising doctors, lawyers, architects, and other professionals.

So far, INSAF has circularised 70,000 posters denouncing child labour, and more than two million others will be distributed later in different cities.

The Ministry of Education's delegates in Casablanca have also joined the effort to ensure the operation is a success. The first step in this cooperation has been registered in Sidi Bernoussi, Casablanca, where schools have set up vigilance cells to report any case of a child taken from school to work.

“Our campaign comes as part of our fight against child labour. But, we are aware that we have to save child by child if we want to eradicate this phenomenon,” admits Othmani.



Through this campaign INSAF intends to save exploited children, especially little girls, who are being increasingly used as maids and ill-treated. The starkest example is little Halima who, as Moroccan newspapers reported, was about to throw herself from the third flour to escape torture.


Earlier this year, the Moroccan Ministry of employment estimated that the number of children working throughout the kingdom at about 600,000, representing 11% of the country's children.

A recent study jointly carried out by the Moroccan ministry of employment, the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (Ipec), Unicef and the World Bank indicated that the age of working children varied between 7 and 14.

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