Deputy Undersecretary of Labour for International Affairs, Ms Thea Lee, said the country does not meet many of the international standards on child labour.
Ms Lee, who was responding to a question by The Nation at a virtual briefing, said though the Nigerian government has validated a national policy on child labour and a national action plan on the elimination of child labour, there is a lot of work that still needs to be done.
She explained that in terms of international standards, the country was deficit in areas such as the minimum age for work, prohibition of child trafficking, prohibition of commercial sexual exploitation, or prohibition of using children in illicit activities.
“So these are very important legal areas where more work needs to be done,” Ms Lee said, adding: “Some of the sectors where we have seen child labour in Nigeria include mining, domestic work, commercial sexual exploitation, and we see that children have been subjected to forced labour in begging, street vending, and domestic work.”
In terms of education, Ms Lee said Nigeria has a high out-of-school rate of approximately 10.5 million children, which means nearly one in three children in Nigeria are out of school. She said the country has one of the highest rate of out-of-school kids in the world.
In the area of law enforcement, the U.S. did not see enough emphasis, enough resources on labour and criminal law enforcement, including the existing protections that are on the books for children in the informal sector.
“And one of the things that we talk to many countries about is the ability to conduct unannounced labor inspections. The government has to be able to show up at a workplace without telling them ahead of time; that is a crucial element in a strong labor inspection system. And making sure that labor inspectors have the ability to enact and collect penalties when they find violations.
‘So those are – those are some of the – that’s the picture that we have in Nigeria. So progress with respect to the national action plan, but much more needing to be done in terms of enforcement and legislation, ” she said.