Creating an enabling environment for child labour free areas in Kenya: Supporting the implementation of the NAP for the elimination of the WFCL with special focus on agriculture & older children Executive Summary The child labour situation in Kenya presents a number of opportunities and challenges for a new ILO-IPEC project. While ILO-IPEC has been active in Kenya since 1992 and considerable advances have been made in a number of different areas, child labour nevertheless persists and is starting to show some signs of getting worse due to the convergence of a number of different crises – food, finance, jobs and political – despite the continued stated national commitment to eliminate the worst forms of child labour by 2015. Following the introduction of free primary education in Kenya in 2003, the number of children – especially the younger ones - attending school increased dramatically and the number of working children decreased by almost half. While empirical data is not yet available, it is expected that with the introduction of Free Day Secondary Education (FDSE) in 2008, the trend of increasing school enrolment may continue and thus have a positive effect on the child labour. Nevertheless, there remain at least 773,000 children in child labour with more than 65% of them out of school. While these education measures have had a meaningful impact on the incidence of child labour in Kenya, it has also meant that those children remaining in child labour are more difficult to reach and may be involved in child labour in a very different way than even 10 years ago. Now 54% of child labourer can be found in the older 15-17 age cohort and 88% can be found in rural areas. There are also significant variances in the proportion of children in child labour from Province to Province. All of these elements present challenges to the new ILO-IPEC project and will require a modified approach. To meet some of these challenges and to still provide needed support to advance towards the government’s goal of eliminating the worst forms of child labour by 2015, this project proposes a two pronged approach. The first approach consists of implementing the National Action Plan at district and local level. This will entail an integrated area based approach, whereby the capacity of the local authorities will be enhanced to deal with child labour in a holistic and coherent manner at district level. The integrated area based approach will allow the local authorities to respond to the rapidly evolving education environment to ensure that child labourers are appropriately taken into consideration and provided with appropriate alternative services and not left behind. As the food and financial crisis affects more and more families and children, the local authorities will also be in a position to understand more quickly the effects of these global events on child labour and education and be able to respond in a comprehensive, holistic and coordinated manner. The integrated area based approach enables local authorities to deal with any and all worst forms of child labour – hazardous work, commercial sexual exploitation, domestic child labour, and mining among others – as they manifest themselves at the local level, thus providing a sustainable formula for the effective elimination of child labour The second approach aims at providing continued support to the national level authorities to further integrate child labour concerns into other sector policies and programmes and to strengthen enforcement capacities. This project will concentrate on strengthening the capacity of the Child Labour Division within the Ministry of Labour to leverage political support and resources (financial, human and especially reporting systems) from sources beyond the ministry, to build sustainable partnerships within the national government and with the social partners and to develop an effective exit strategy for ILO-IPEC support at the national level that will lead to a long-term strategy of the Government to sustain action against child labour. Within these two approaches, special emphasis and focus will be given to child labourers in rural areas – e