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{
    "id": 697451,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/697451/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 156,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Mohamed Diriye",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 2995,
        "legal_name": "Diriye Abdullahi Mohamed",
        "slug": "diriye-abdullahi-mohamed"
    },
    "content": "Thank you, Hon. Speaker. I also wish to support Sessional Paper No.1 of 2015 on the National Policy on the Elimination of Child Labour. I want to congratulate Hon. Millie Odhiambo for her bold move in sponsoring that law. I agree with her fully that this country has laws but we lack implementation. I hope the passage of this Policy will not be in vain because it has very important components. If we implement it, it will have a big impact in terms of elimination of child labour. A number of interventions have been taken up to address the issue of child labour in Kenya. However, no sustainable progress towards total elimination has been realised. The challenges to effective and sustainable reduction include low levels of economic development, higher incidences of poverty, unemployment, challenges in the education sector and inconsistencies in legislation. Other factors include rural-urban migration, socio-cultural practices, lack of up-to-date data on child labour and weak enforcement of laws at the institutional level. I want to speak on very few of these challenges. We have challenges in the education sector. You cannot separate children and education. For us to eliminate child labour, we must reform our education sector. As I speak, children from nomadic communities are looking after livestock instead of going to school. They are being subjected to child labour and abuse. After analysis, you will realise that these children are not in school because of lack of enough supportive mechanisms. In the arid and semi-arid areas, we have low cost boarding schools. They have been there. They gave many children an opportunity to access education and helped reduce child labour. This is because education officers went out and took children to the boarding schools supported by the Government through the low cost boarding school funding. In doing so, children were protected from labour. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has neglected the funding of low cost boarding schools. The ones that are there are very few because the population has also grown. Children in rural areas, whose parents are nomads, have no option but to look after their livestock. Reforms in the education sector have been cited as factors to eliminate child labour. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology should take deliberate policies to increase access to education."
}