Child Labor Specific Programs

An incredible variety of policies and programs have been directed towards working children, and there are a considerable number of policy documents that describe these activities. ILO (2006b) for example reviews several ILO affiliated programs. This section briefly discusses these types of programs. However, causal evidence that has survived peer review within

economics does not appear to exist for any of these programs at the time of writing.

Information or awareness campaigns attempt to educate parents, employers, and children that children should not work or should attend school. The mechanisms for delivery of

information vary as does the precise content of information conveyed. Mass media campaigns are frequent, employing radio or TV programs, news reports, or billboards. Community mobilization is also common where activists or community leaders reach out personally to individuals involved with working or out of school children. Another frequent community mobilization approach is to organize community events that draw attention to whatever type of activity is being targeted. In practice, information and awareness campaigns seem to be the most common type of policy directed at working children, and they seem to be motivated in part by assumptions that parents do not know what is best for their children.

Income replacement programs attempt to compensate families for the loss of the child's income in the event that the child stops working. Some programs aim to provide alternative sources of income to the household, often to the mother, by providing working capital and training. Implicit in these programs is that parents make decisions about whether children work and that the direct economic contribution of the child's work is a main reason why children work. Other programs, attempt to redirect children towards work activities that are more compatible with schooling. For example, one program in Brazil gave working children goats, because it is easy to care for goats outside of school hours. These child income replacement programs address the child's agency in work decisions in addition to economic motives for work. Often,

income replacements programs contain some conditionality component. For example,

conditional cash transfers typically require that children attend school in order receive transfers. Conditional cash transfers are the one type of child labor related program that have received rigorous evaluation, and we discuss these in detail in section 5.4.

Flexible schooling programs attempt to make schooling and work more compatible. That is, they typically do nothing to influence whether the child works, but instead aim to make schooling compatible with work. In this way, flexible schooling programs mitigate the costs of working. Many different types of programs are prevalent. School hours can be modified to accommodate work schedules. Academic calendars can be adjusted to reflect local conditions. Additional school shifts could be added during off-work times. Independent study modules might allow students to progress through schooling at their own pace. The assumptions behind these programs is that it is the timing of school that causes the conflict between work and school and that the actual time spent working is not enough in itself to impair human capital

accumulation. Some flexible schooling programs also modify the curriculum to increase child interest in the program. Others, attempt to extend school hours so that children have activities during times in which they would normally work. The assumption behind these daycare like programs is that an important portion of child time spent working is just a way to occupy the child's time.

It is straightforward to imagine how programs designed to prevent children from starting to work can influence child schooling, but children who are already working need help to reenter school. Reintegration projects aim to help students return to regular school when students have missed school or lag behind in school because of work. Working children may be unfamiliar with the school environment, be poorly socialized for schooling, and may be significantly older than nonworking children with the same educational background. This makes returning working children to school a challenge. Most reintegration projects include some counseling directed at formerly working children, some remedial education to catch working children up to age in skills, and some bridge program to gradually introduce working children back into the

classroom. This emphasis on how to get working children back into school is often neglected in economics discussions, because most theoretical models such as that of section 1 treat child time allocation as seamless between different sectors of work, schooling, and leisure.

Unfortunately, while these policies are pervasive, scientific evaluation of them is not. This absence of policy research severely limits our ability to design or improve existing policy. To be effective, scientific evaluation needs to be designed into a project from its inception, with control populations selected to be comparable, ideally through randomization. This is rare. It is telling that of the 35 final program evaluations included in ILO (2006b), none of the publicly available research has been peer reviewed by independent researchers. The typical objection to formal evaluation is expense, but the growing body of randomized evaluation of education related initiatives shows that careful, informative, and scientific evaluations can be conducted on modest budgets. Moreover, considerable money is being spent on evaluation. That research is just not being held to the standards of peer review that are commonplace in other sciences. Hopefully, future scientific research on how these projects influence time allocation can both improve the design of policy and build our understanding of the determinants of work.