World Day against Child Labour Awareness Campaign

Campaign activities drew on a variety of strategies to raise awareness about children's rights, and included:

• The creation and distribution of printed materials, such as a World Day against Child Labour sticker (10,000 copies), an information brochure for students (15-18) about their rights at work (5,000 copies), and 5,000 copies of a leaflet for students, teachers, and parents introducing the main aspects of child labour (national and international standards prohibiting child labour, statistics, and focus issues, such as slavery, trafficking, child soldiers);
• the provision of information via in-person sessions, such as lectures in
  secondary schools;
• community mobilisation in the form of community action days in towns and villages in the Galilee, with an emphasis on engaging children aged 5-12 in an activity day which was specifically focused on the child's right to engage in play (as opposed to his/her economic exploitation as a child labourer); and
• public screening of films dealing with child labour, such as "Al-Aydi Al-Saghira" ("Little Hands").

Prior to these activities being offered, facilitators participated in an intensive full-day training on the issue of child labour and the rights of students at work. They were provided with didactic guidance on how to present the topic to students and adults, with a focus on national and international standards prohibiting child labour. These facilitators then applied the knowledge gained through this training to provide workshops to the members of existing HRA student forums.

As part of the workshops that ensued, forum members were asked to develop a practical plan for the community action days (described above) that they were asked to hold in their respective hometowns (Nazareth, Yaffa Nazareth, Reineh, Tamra, Mizra). Participatory strategies were key here, as it was the youth themselves who planned the action days, distributed stickers and informational material, screened the films, and found ways to involve citizens in activities and discussions - with coaching by project coordinators. Facilitators and project coordinators also held lectures on child labour and students' rights at work in 8-10 local high schools and distributed the publications described above.

Children, Youth, Rights.

According to organisers, child rights in general and child labour in particular are forgotten issues on Israel's public agenda, and they also receive comparably little attention from civil society groups, especially within the Palestinian Arab community. Little official data and professional research are available, they say, on economic exploitation of children in Israel. As a result, the average citizen has limited or no knowledge of the problem of child labour or the national and international legal standards that prohibit it (such as the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) or the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention No. 187 on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour). Moreover, they indicate that most working teenagers above the minimum working age of 15 are unaware of the rights they have as minors at work.

Sawt el-Amel and HRA believe that lack of awareness and economic hardship are the breeding ground for economic exploitation of children. They explain that Arab citizens in Israel live under harsh socio-economic circumstances, exemplified by a disproportionately high poverty rate (52% as compared to 16% of Jewish Israelis), with child poverty being even higher than the average (almost 60% of Arab children in Israel are economically poor).

The collaborating organisations indicate that they are committed to use the momentum gained through this pilot project to integrate the issues of child labour and workers' rights of minors into their existing long-term project activities. (Both Sawt el-Amel and HRA have existing projects that have natural links to the issues of child labour and workers' rights of minors, such the HRA's Education Department and Sawt el-Amel's Legal Clinic). However, the initiative is aimed not only at spurring new projects within the two organisations but also at increasing broader expertise in, and attention to, the issue of child labour as it affects the Arab community in Israel.