COSTA RICA NEWS – About 47 .000 children and teenagers work today in Costa Rica, mainly in the agricultural and livestock sector, fairs and informal employments, reflect reports of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security (MTSS).
The head of the Department of Special Protection to Workers, Esmirna Sanchez, acknowledged that this figure may be higher and associated the high incidence of the problem to poverty, which affects 20.7 percent of households in this country.
She said that the school drop-out rate is another factor that affects so many children under the age of 15 who decided to join the workforce.
According to Sanchez, each month in her office they recieve just five out of six complaints related to child labour, but in accordance to the factors mentioned above she noted that these are few compared to what they assume is happening.
She said that in the cases detected, after the precise verifications, the process of child and teenager protection is activated, which includes the granting of financial assistance from the National Scholarship Fund of Costa Rica, a country that since 1998 seeks to eradicate this scourge.
I was under the impression that school attendance was mandatory here, although I don’t understand how a minimum-wage unskilled worker could afford to keep more than one child in school. My kids, who attend public schools, need uniforms, mandatory supplies, and frequent contributions for various school-related costs. Aren’t there also child-labor laws? I also wonder how many kids are in school, as I don’t know if the 47,000 figure is high. It would be helpful if the author of this piece gave some of this background information for those of us who are only marginally informed about the educational system here – since this is an English-language site, I assume that many of the readers here are expats.
As I noted above, I don’t know how poorer families keep their kids in school. For that matter, I really don’t know how they can afford to house and feed themselves. Some families need their kids to work to keep a roof over their families’ heads. Unfortunately, US culture has influenced too many other kids, and they expect fast food and other luxuries that are out of their reach unless they work. A friend of mine worked as a teenager for a brief period trying to sell junk at intersections. Those kids are coordinated and deployed by modern-day Fagins who pay out commissions to their illegal employees.
This is just one more area where the government needs to take a close look at its programs. The scholarship is one good program, but apparently it isn’t fully addressing the problem. Someone should do a study that looks at the reasons for, and age and grade level at which the kid dropped out to see if there are measures that would keep them in school. One problem I see is that some kids don’t advance to the next grade because they didn’t get the minimum exam score for one subject. If this happens a few times and they are fifteen in fifth grade, I can see why they would want to drop out. One initiative that would address this problem is a summer school program (there is no summer school for public schools here) where kids could catch up on the subject(s) they failed and take the exam(s) again for the opportunity to advance to the next grade. In the long run, such a program would move children through the educational system faster and ultimately save the government money.