Photo: Sumaira Jajja/IRIN

School children attending class at Noor Model School in Shamshatoo, Pakistan

SHAMSHATOO,  – Widespread poverty and ignorance, negative attitudes to the education of girls, and the lack of proper documents for children of Afghan migrants are some of the obstacles to school enrolment in a poor suburb of Peshawar in Pakistan, say local officials.

In Shamshatoo on the outskirts of Peshawar, capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, many children were born of Afghan refugee parents. The camp where they used to live is now closed, but a sizeable number of Afghans still live in the area. Jobs are hard to find and many of the most vulnerable families end up working as bonded labourers in nearby brick kilns.

Poverty means they cannot give their children’s education the priority they would like to.

“The families here are very poor and for them every working hand counts. When you have to deliver 1,000 bricks to earn Rs 300 (US$3) a day with two hands, how much can you do?” said Obaidullah Khan, a director at the charity Abasseen Foundation Pakistan, which, together with Abasseen Foundation UK and Austrian NGO Hope 87, decided to do something to help and set up a school.

Noor Model School in Baghbanan village, Shamshatoo, opened its doors in January 2009, after a local donated the land. It charges school fees of Rs 25 (27 US cents) per month.

“When the school started, there were 44 boys and four girls. So far not many boys have dropped out. We do see girls leaving the school before finishing class two,” said Inamullah Khan, the school principal. “People here don’t like to send their girls outside and once they cross a certain age, the first priority is to get them married.

Visiting the school, IRIN found over 150 boys and some 70 girls enrolled in five classes (nursery to class four). “Many parents reluctantly sent their children to school after I personally convinced them. I am a Hafiz-e-Quran [a respected Koran memorizer] and they know it,” said the principal.

“I want to be a teacher or a doctor,” said Sabir, aged nine. The son of a driver, Sabir and his younger brother are luckier than the other boys around them. Despite their limited means, they do not have to work in the brick kilns which line the road leading to Shamshatoo.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has some of the lowest school enrolment rates in Pakistan. According to data at the provincial offices, gross enrolment for girls ranges from 58-72 percent for ages 5-10, compared to 77-97 percent for boys in the same age group.

The situation is compounded by insecurity, which continues to displace people. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, some 149,440 families (683,550 individuals) are displaced in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas due to ongoing insecurity and sectarian violence.

Wasted lives

Many of the children in the Shamshatoo area, especially those who don’t attend school, work from an early age. Naseer* helps his father make bricks after school. “It is hot and I don’t like it but I cannot say no to my father. If I work fine, I get sweets,” said the six-year-old.

Thirty-eight boys out of the 150 boys in the school work in brick kilns after school, their tiny fingernails stained by pigment from the bricks. The girls fare no better than the boys. They might be spared working in the kilns, but many are married off at an early age, some as young as 12.

The parents whose children go to Noor school said they wanted them to get a good education. “I want my children to study and do something good with their lives,” said Razia.* Two of her daughters and three sons are students at the school. The wife of a daily wage-earner, she sees education as way out of poverty.

“I have seen many families collect loans and then try to pay them back the rest of their lives. The loans at times are for medical expenses, maybe operations, or even wedding meals,” she said. “When putting together two meals a day is a tough task, you have to make tough choices.”

New law may help

Government officials say the situation will improve when a new constitution guaranteeing free education for young children is passed.

“After the passage of the 18th Amendment in the Constitution, the insertion of Article 25-A guarantees that children aged 5-16 are provided free education by the state. This will help in achieving our MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] but what we must realize is that the province lacks infrastructure and resources,” said an official who requested anonymity. “This is complicated by the traditional norms and culture, where girls’ education is looked down upon.”

Data available from the provincial elementary and secondary education department shows that 525 primary schools were built in the province in 2009. Of these, 50 percent were set up as girls’ schools.

“Girl students in public schools are given a stipend as an incentive to continue with their studies from class six onwards to class 10, while free text books are provided to all students from nursery to intermediate level (grade 12),” the official added. Despite this, enrolment rates have remained very low.

“First there is the issue of fees, then mobility, especially those of females,” said Obaidullah Khan. “We don’t have many committed teachers in the public sector and they always prefer staying in urban areas, rather than serve in rural sector. Even for the private sector or NGOs, getting good teachers is a big challenge, as not many women are willing to work in rural areas.”

sj/eo/cb source www.irinnews.org

PAK KRED, – In an impoverished town in Thailand near the border with Myanmar, a trafficker offered a desperate Burmese widow 5,000 baht (US$160) on the spot, followed by an additional 4,000 baht ($120) per month for two of her 10 children to sell flowers in the Thai capital, Bangkok. The rent-a-child deal was to last three months, after which the boys would return home.  

But the deadline passed and the monthly payments stopped. After another three months the older brother, 10-year-old Ongsi, ran away and managed to make his way home to tell his mother they had to return to the capital to rescue 8-year-old Siyathon from a life of late-night flower selling and beatings.

Their case is not unusual. Across the city of more than 10 million, little Burmese vendors sell flowers and Cambodian children beg money from motorists, tourists and bar crawlers.

“Most of these children are not Thai,” said Witanapat Rutanavaleepong, who manages the Stop Child Begging project for the Mirror Foundation, a leading Thai NGO that has become a focal point for child trafficking.

He estimates there are at least 1,000 child beggars and flower sellers working in cities and tourist spots around the country. Since he began working with the Mirror Foundation two years ago, Witanapat has come across only one case involving three Thai children, although he handles up to 30 cases a month. The problem remains intractable in the capital.

“Thailand has a problem with child begging that is hard to solve because the authorities do not see it as a problem that affects their [the children’s] future or society,” Witanapat said. “They see them as only child beggars, but the girls and some boys often go on to become sex workers, and the boys often become traffickers themselves.”

Rescue and arrest

The initial journey from their village to Bangkok was harrowing, said Siyathon, who speaks Thai fluently although he is Burmese. “I spent the night in the forest, walked for a day, and then a truck took me to a gas station where a taxi brought me to the house [where I stayed],” he told IRIN at a boys’ shelter in Pak Kred in Nonthaburi Province, a northern suburb of Bangkok. His brother joined him soon afterwards. “If we sold well, we were not beaten, but even if we sold 2,000 or 3,000 baht ($60 or $95) worth, it still wasn’t enough.”

One day, Ongsi, his older brother, managed to escape with some friends, and eventually made his way home to Mae Sot Province, several hundred kilometres away.

Photo: Alisa Tang/IRIN

Eight-year-old Siyathon, left, and Ongsi, 10, are now back with their mother

Ongsi returned to Bangkok with his mother, but they were unable to find Siyathon on their own and sought help from the Mirror Foundation and the police, who sent plainclothes officers to an area known for trafficking children. In late April they spotted a child who fitted the description.

“One female officer called out his name, ‘Siyathon!’ and he turned to face her. We found him,” said Lt. Col. Choosak Apaipakdi, of the police anti-human trafficking division. “When the owner of the home followed the boy out, we assumed she was the trafficker. Police confronted and arrested her.”

Child exploitation

The United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking (UNIAP), said the number of children begging and selling flowers remains unclear, but the problem is significant. Lisa Rende Taylor, chief technical advisor for UNIAP for Southeast Asia, said children are being rented or sold by their families or guardians, and then controlled in order to make money for someone, and whether or not permission was granted, these children are victims of trafficking.

“The definition of child trafficking is essentially the act of recruiting, harbouring, or receiving a child for the purpose of exploitation. The child could go along with it, the parents at home could go along with it – it doesn’t matter – there does not need to be deception or force. If it is a child, if someone receives and controls them, it is trafficking,” Rende Taylor said. “You just have to walk the streets of Bangkok or Pattaya [a resort town] to know that this is still an issue.”

The typical payment for a rented child is reportedly around $25 a month, she said. However, it is hard to crack down on the trade when there is a “revolving door at the border”, and a focus on the children rather than on the criminal perpetrators.

According to the US State Department, Thailand remains a source, destination, and transit country for trafficking men, women and children. Most of the trafficked victims identified in Thailand are from neighbouring countries like Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, and have been forced, coerced, or defrauded into labour or commercial sexual exploitation.

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source www.irinnews.org

MANILA,  – The Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) have edged nearer to a peace treaty after agreeing to a set of consensus points that could lead to less confrontation on the ground, officials say.

At talks in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, at the end of April, both sides signed a document containing “decision points on principles” that they said would open public scrutiny of any final peace deal with the 12,000-strong MILF, which has been engaged in a bloody rebellion for the past three decades on the southern island of Mindanao.

Among the 10 points in the document was consensus on creating a new autonomous political body to replace the current, often problematic, Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), comprising six provinces and two cities that is home to some 2.8 million Muslim Filipinos.

ARMM was established in 1996 to provide the predominately Muslim population with some degree of self-rule after a peace agreement between the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), a former rebel group, and Manila, with the MNFL head as its first governor.

Despite millions of dollars in government assistance and resources, the area remains mired in poverty, corruption and violence.

Other key points in the document are the strengthening of Islamic courts, “assertion” of the people’s basic rights – including those of the displaced – and sharing power and wealth in the mineral-rich region.

“This agreement should serve as a memorandum for both sides of the general directions of the negotiations as we move closer to a peace agreement,” Teresita Deles, the government’s chief presidential adviser on the peace talks, told IRIN.

The transparent way in which the talks were being held could avoid further confusion that could lead to a new explosion of violence, and another round of displacements in the Mindanao region, she said.

It would also serve to calm tensions on both sides, and allow greater access to humanitarian workers on the ground to help those still in dire need of assistance, Deles noted.

“This generates more goodwill – to see evidence that despite the distance between our positions, there is substantive common ground that has in fact been engendered on the table,” she said.

According to MILF chief negotiator Mohagher Iqbal, despite the consensus points, the two sides are still “worlds apart” in reaching a final agreement.

MILF remained committed to the peace talks, and to the basic principles outlined in the consensus points, he said, but pointed out that the government had previously reneged on its promises, including the doomed proposed deal signed by both sides in 2008, which would have given them control over large swathes of the area they consider as “ancestral domain”.

The deal was rejected by the Philippine Supreme Court, triggering violence and large-scale displacement. “The peace negotiations, however, are continuing, if limping,” Iqbal told IRIN. He didn’t think a final peace deal would be signed in 2012.

Meanwhile, MILF fighters would abide by the truce, and an earlier agreement to help civilians caught up in the crossfire to return to their homes, he said.

Talks with the government opened in 2003 but were marred by periodic accusations of truce violations by both sides. In 2008, the MILF launched simultaneous attacks across Mindanao that left about 750,000 people displaced and nearly 400 dead on both sides.

Negotiations were resumed after President Benigno Aquino came to power in 2010, but again came close to collapsing in late 2011, when 19 Special Forces troops were killed while storming an MILF camp in the south.

The killing triggered heavy artillery reprisals from the army and the displacement of about another 30,000 people. Nonetheless, Aquino rejected widespread calls for an all-out war and ordered a return to the peace table, along with efforts to help the newly displaced.

Social Welfare Secretary Corazon Soliman said most of those displaced in 2008 and 2011 have since returned to their homes, but many were moved to camps that were vulnerable to deadly natural disasters such as flooding, but which eventually became their permanent residence.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development estimates that at the end of 2011 some 46,000 internally displaced people were living in more than 40 camps and relocation sites across Mindanao.

Many of them have refused to return home for fear of getting caught in the crossfire again, and because basic services are more accessible in the camps than in the far-flung villages they come from.

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source www.irinnews.org