Afghan Abdul Wahab swings a heavy sledgehammer down onto a red hot piece of metal to mold it into a truck part, sweat dripping down a face marked with grime and soot from the fire, and with a focus rare for an 11-year-old.
Wahab is one of about 1.2 million Afghan children in part or full time work, the government says, in a country where war, poverty, widespread unemployment and a preference for large families have created a huge underage labor market.
A study released this year by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission found that an even larger portion of the country’s 15 million children — up to 40 percent — were likely to be engaged in some sort of paid work. And aid and rights groups say child labor laws are routinely flouted.
Photo: Reuters
While Afghan children can legally work up to 35 hours a week from the age of 14, they are not allowed to do hazardous jobs like Wahab’s work in his father’s Kabul blacksmith shop.
“I would like to go to school, but my father’s alone here so I must help him,” said Wahab, whose shoulders appear broad for his age because of the physical blacksmith work. “My father can’t feed us alone because the food in the market is very expensive ... we don’t receive any assistance from the government.”
His father, Abdul Rosaq, said he moved his wife and four children to Kabul two years ago from the western city of Herat.
“We have to work. I don’t like my son working here. I want him to go to school, but we have to work,” said Rosaq, who earns about 1,500 Afghanis (US$33) a week in Kabul’s Parwan 3 neighborhood, a hub of mechanics workshops.
After 30 years of conflict, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, where children make up half the population, a quarter of children die before the age of five and the average Afghan life expectancy is 44 years.
Some children work for mechanics, in agriculture, weaving carpets, selling goods on the street, begging for money wiping down dusty vehicles stuck in Kabul’s chronic traffic jams, or collecting cans and bottles from the city’s putrid rubbish dump.
The average annual income for an Afghan is US$370 a year, according to the World Bank, and many families have to choose between giving children an education or sending them out to work.
“A majority of them start to work from age nine and we have kids below nine selling things on the street,” Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commissioner Nader Nadery said. “A major portion of these kids ... are breadwinners for their families.”
He said working children did not shock Afghans anymore, but it was a key rights and social problem and the government lacked a plan and resources to deal with it. The commission says that at least 1.5 million children are breadwinners for their families.
“If it’s not dealt with, if they are left without education, then we are not only prolonging the conflict and providing more recruitees for it, but also we undermine any possibility of growth and the future development of the country,” Nadery said.
Although Afghanistan signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1994, UNICEF last month called for a comprehensive Child Act to fully protect the country’s children.
Afghani Deputy Minister for Social Affairs Wasil Noor Muhmand said the government has a Child Protection Action Network, a joint initiative with aid groups, operating in 28 of the 34 provinces, covering a third of an estimated 6.5 million at risk children.
Muhmand said that decades of war in Afghanistan had left many children without fathers, making them responsible for supporting their family and that as a result the country had to let teenagers work, but not in hazardous jobs.
Flexible schooling to cater for working children was one way of making sure some children did not miss out on an education and programs that offered vocational training as well as traditional subjects, a spokesman for Save The Children said.
He said that while it was entrenched in Afghan culture and religion that children should be in school, it had become socially acceptable to send children out to work because families had become so desperate.
China has claimed a breakthrough in developing homegrown chipmaking equipment, an important step in overcoming US sanctions designed to thwart Beijing’s semiconductor goals. State-linked organizations are advised to use a new laser-based immersion lithography machine with a resolution of 65 nanometers or better, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an announcement this month. Although the note does not specify the supplier, the spec marks a significant step up from the previous most advanced indigenous equipment — developed by Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment Group Co (SMEE, 上海微電子) — which stood at about 90 nanometers. MIIT’s claimed advances last
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has appointed Rose Castanares, executive vice president of TSMC Arizona, as president of the subsidiary, which is responsible for carrying out massive investments by the Taiwanese tech giant in the US state, the company said in a statement yesterday. Castanares will succeed Brian Harrison as president of the Arizona subsidiary on Oct. 1 after the incumbent president steps down from the position with a transfer to the Arizona CEO office to serve as an advisor to TSMC Arizona’s chairman, the statement said. According to TSMC, Harrison is scheduled to retire on Dec. 31. Castanares joined TSMC in
EUROPE ON HOLD: Among a flurry of announcements, Intel said it would postpone new factories in Germany and Poland, but remains committed to its US expansion Intel Corp chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger has landed Amazon.com Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a customer for the company’s manufacturing business, potentially bringing work to new plants under construction in the US and boosting his efforts to turn around the embattled chipmaker. Intel and AWS are to coinvest in a custom semiconductor for artificial intelligence computing — what is known as a fabric chip — in a “multiyear, multibillion-dollar framework,” Intel said in a statement on Monday. The work would rely on Intel’s 18A process, an advanced chipmaking technology. Intel shares rose more than 8 percent in late trading after the
FACTORY SHIFT: While Taiwan produces most of the world’s AI servers, firms are under pressure to move manufacturing amid geopolitical tensions Lenovo Group Ltd (聯想) started building artificial intelligence (AI) servers in India’s south, the latest boon for the rapidly growing country’s push to become a high-tech powerhouse. The company yesterday said it has started making the large, powerful computers in Pondicherry, southeastern India, moving beyond products such as laptops and smartphones. The Chinese company would also build out its facilities in the Bangalore region, including a research lab with a focus on AI. Lenovo’s plans mark another win for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who tries to attract more technology investment into the country. While India’s tense relationship with China has suffered setbacks