REPORT BY TAPIWA ZIVIRA, ONLINE REPORTER
Braving the weather, he hurriedly takes a bath in the makeshift backyard bathroom before heading across the yard to the biggest round hut that serves as the kitchen.
In the kitchen, Ambuya Masango, Tawanda’s 71-year-old grandmother has just finished preparing a breakfast of tea and sweet potatoes.
Now sitting by the fire and enjoying his tea, Tawanda shares part of the story of his life.
“I had my first job at 11,” he says, sipping the steaming tea, “It was general farm work, like sowing, weeding, or spraying crops.”
He wipes some sweet potato peels off his well-ironed school uniform.
“I was not alone, several boys and girls from this village were also working. The money was quite good, sometimes $10 a week. I could buy some foodstuffs here at home and help Ambuya,” he says. “At that time, all we needed was money, not school.”
But after working for two years, Tawanda, then aged 13, returned to school where he joined a Grade 5 class at Masimbiti Primary School in Chiredzi rural district. The return to school changed his perspective.
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“Since I came back to school two years ago, I feel hopeful of being an engineer again,” he says as he straightens his uniform, readying himself for the 2km journey to school.
Now in Grade 7, his final year in primary school, Tawanda says he is putting extra effort so that he passes the end of year examinations.
As he walks into the dirty road and waves goodbye, rays of the sun illuminate his uniform, signalling, perhaps a new era here in Chiredzi, where the community, non-governmental organisations and government are in a joint effort to combat child labour and keep former child labourers like Tawanda in school.
This multi-stakeholder co-operation goes back five years when the Coalition Against Child Labour in Zimbabwe (Caclaz), having carried out a baseline survey on child labour in 2007, discovered that Chiredzi had one of the highest child labour prevalence in the country.
It was discovered that in Chiredzi district, Ward 16 alone, nearly 40% of children aged between five and 18, numbering about 3 000 were likely to be in child labour, particularly in sugar plantations.
In a 2010 report Unicef discovered that an estimated 13% of children under the age of 15 in Zimbabwe were child labourers.
Zimbabwe had a population of about 5,7 million under 15, who represented 41% of the population, according to the 2012 national census. The General Agriculture and Plantation Workers Union of Zimbabwe (Gapwuz), which is part of the three-member Caclaz coalition, in its report released in 2010, also concluded that there was a general high rate of child labour and other human and workers’ rights abuses in farming communities.
Other partners in the Caclaz coalition are the Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ), the African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect (ANPPCAN) Zimbabwe chapter.
PTUZ, which represents teachers, is included in the partnership because of the realisation that teachers are critical players in ending child labour while ANPPCAN plays a watchdog role as it focuses on national policies affecting children.
Gapwuz, which represents farm workers and has trade union structures in farm communities, where there are high incidences of child labour, has its focus on labour patterns in the country.
Gapwuz attributed the high child labour rate in farming communities to Zimbabwe’s land reforms exercise and estimates that over 100 000 farm workers were left jobless and displaced; a phenomenon the union says triggered mass dropouts from school.
In addition to the displacement, the thousands of farmers allocated land found themselves in remote areas where there were no schools, leaving their children vulnerable to child labour.
Left with no option, some villagers in these news resttlement areas built schools on their own, using the only available materials — wood, dagga and grass, but these were not adequate.
One of the schools built like that was Uswaushava Primary School, also in Chiredzi.
During its early days, Uswaushava — with its pole, mud, and grass classrooms — represented one of the sad stories of education in post-independence and post-land reform Zimbabwe.
With no proper desks and chairs, pupils sat on rough benches made out of poles and wrote from their laps. To deal with the dust from the red soil, pupils had to spread cow dung on the dagga floors of the classrooms.
It was with the emergence of Caclaz, working closely with the Education ministry, villagers, and other non-governmental organisations that a project to declare the 188 villages in Chiredzi Ward 16, a child-labour free zone, was conceived.
This was to be done under a concept of eliminating child labour by improving schools’ infrastructure and resource capacities to make the learning environment attractive and accommodating to pupils.
Another goal was to get child labourers back to school, where they would have a special curriculum — called bridge schools — to accelerate their progress in school. Borrowed from India, where over a million children have returned to school, the concept would then involve the entire community to ensure the children remained in school and got reintegrated into the mainstream curriculum.
As the project kicked off in pilot stage, Uswaushava and Masimbiti schools were chosen as hosts to the bridge schools. With the community’s active involvement, proper brick and mortar classrooms were constructed while at the same time former child labourers like Tawanda were reintegrated into school.
At the time of the inception of the project, it was estimated there were 3000 child labourers in Chiredzi’s Ward 16. According to Caclaz director Pascal Masocha, “so far 2150 have returned to school through direct interventions and many more through spread effects.”
Spread effects, Masocha said, refers to the consciousness raised by the intense awareness campaigns Caclaz carried, which resulted in members of the communities realising the need to send children back to school. Masocha said the aim in Chiredzi is “to now focus on sustaining good practices learnt, as well as building community capacity through income generating projects so that they can keep children in school.”
With the project now focusing on income generating projects for the communities, a major threat is emerging — the haemorrhaging economy. With the government seemingly clueless on how to get the economy back on track, successes realised in the project could be in danger.
“So far a few challenges are making the task of sustaining children in school difficult, and these include the debilitating poverty currently gripping the majority of the rural people,” said Masocha. With job losses continuing, Zimbabweans are crossing borders in search of better fortunes. Masocha said former child labourers are at a higher risk of being attracted to drop out of school cross the border to work.
“Not only adults, but minors, especially former child labourers are wooed by the greener grass across the borders, and this could, unfortunately, reverse the gains we had made in getting children back to school,” said Masocha.
But, Tawanda Masango remains focussed on his engineering career, oblivious of the economic crisis that could cripple this hope.
*Name has been changed to protect the identity of the minor
