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Sixteen per cent of Zimbabwe children forced to work: report
Deutsche Presse Agentur (DPA)
May 15, 2006

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/VBOL-6PTD2C?OpenDocument

Harare (dpa) - More than 400,000 children in Zimbabwe are involved in child labour, mostly because of crippling financial hardships affecting their families, said the state-controlled Herald newspaper on Monday.

According to the Central Statistical Office (CS0), 423,880 children are child labourers. The figure represent 16 per cent of all children in Zimbabwe, says the report.

It says that most of the children "should have been in school but were forced out by social and financial factors." They work in farms and in homes, it said.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of its worst-ever economic crisis, with inflation running at 1,042.9 per cent and rising. School fees at government schools were recently massively increased, sometimes 10-fold, leading to predictions even more children will be forced to drop out of lessons.

There have been concerns that many children now working on farms are being given a sub-economic wage.

According to the Herald, a significant percentage of child labourers in the key Mashonaland Central province, in the middle of Zimbabwe, have never been to school. dpa rt ch

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