Informal Economy Good Practices: Advocacy and Government Ownership

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This blog entry is to share another of the good practices observed during the evaluation of the US Department of Labor’s E-FACE project in Ethiopia. It has been proven many times that when families are economically empowered, they will not need to put their children into exploitative child labour. To accomplish economic empowerment, the project worked to improve the livelihoods of children and families involved in child labour among other actions. This included attention to increasing the productivity of adults, improved occupational safety and health, as well as increased access to micro-finance. E-FACE also included vocational training for older children to economically empower them.

As a reminder, E-FACE—which stands for Ethiopians Fighting against Child Exploitation—is a multi-organizational effort to reduce the number of children involved in child labour and trafficking in Ethiopia, specifically in its weaving industry. Over nearly three weeks in Ethiopia, the evaluation team visited the three areas of Ethiopia the project was operational in: Gamo Gofa Zone, Wolaita Zone, and the capital Addis Ababa.

During its four years in Ethiopia, the E-Face project was able to make a great deal of progress towards its goals. Many of the project’s achievements were due to its good practices. Here we wish to share the E-face project’s good practice on the ways it conducted advocacy and increased government involvement and commitment.

According to the project, one of the main challenges originally facing their efforts to coordinate with the government was the limited awareness on the issue at hand on the part of the government officials at local level. Simply put, government officials and also the public were not yet entirely aware of the full extent to which child exploitation was occurring. As a result, child traffickers and informal businesses employing child labour were able to operate informally, meaning that government was not aware of their existence and unable to intervene in their affairs. To work on this, the project made advocacy and awareness-raising among their primary focuses.

Government officials, police, labour inspectors, and social workers were invited to trainings where they were further educated on the realities of child labour and child trafficking in their areas, and were advised on actions that they could take to help reduce them. Their awareness that poverty is the cause of child labour increased. The government officials, now more aware that such a serious problem existed, actually already had many of the tools to begin taking action on these challenges. These included local government specialists to provide support and monitoring on livelihoods and related subjects.

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Above: At Chencha Town, in the Gamo Gofa Zone of Ethiopia, a Woreda (district) – level official explains the government’s efforts in his district to formalize village savings efforts.

Officials emphasized their desire to continue to regulate and monitor the situation long after the project had ended. All of the government officials spoke about their commitment to eradicating exploitative child labour and have put by-laws in place in every project location to regulate it. The by-laws cover areas beyond the areas in which the project was active thus vastly increasing the impact of the project.

Clearly, the project’s practices in the trainings effectively addressed the issues caused by the lack of awareness. The trainings gave the government officials, including those working in the small enterprise and cooperatives offices, more tools to begin formalising economic activities that had exploited children. The formalising processes enables the government to more closely provide support and monitor economic activities to business owners to improve their businesses.

More of the project’s good practices were present in its identification of and response to government policies that had inadvertently supported exploitation. In Ethiopia, individuals need to be at least 18 years old to register formal, collective economic activities with the government. The project helped youth groups to organise into associations to engage in collective economic activities. Most of the members of the associations were, however, less than 18 years of age. Due to the government’s policy, these associations could normally not be formally registered and would be forced to be informal, and unregulated. The government would not monitor these worksites, enforce occupational safety and health, nor could it register social benefits for the workers. The government had this limitation not in that it was prevented from doing so, but in that by not having these businesses registered it would not aware of the existence of many of them.

This was problematic for the project, as one of its efforts was to bring these unorganized, informal child weavers together to form worker’s associations with decent worker’s rights and worksite conditions. The idea was to improve the economic status of the association’s members while, through their membership in a government-registered association, putting them in the formal economy

To overcome this, the project worked with the government to make exceptions for the weaver’s associations. With this move, child weavers’ associations were registered and formalized. Here, too, the project had two good practices: formalizing these groups of child weavers and helping the government identify and eliminate its policies that required adjustment in order to discourage exploitative child labour.

Though this project sought only to eliminate exploitative child labour and child trafficking in project areas, which many of its actions largely accomplished, it also had the effect of greatly formalizing the child weaving industry in Gamo Gofa, Wolaita, and Addis Ababa. These good practices with regards to government involvement helped it accomplish this. By replicating these practices, of training government officials, organizing informal workers into formal groups with better working conditions, and helping the government modify policies so as not to inadvertently encourage informality, other projects may find similar success.