Tripartite representatives of the Superior Labor Council of Costa Rica, signed a memorandum of understanding this Thursday, January 31, that begins the activities of the National Decent Work Program 2019-2023.

The Plan refers in its Result 1.2 “the firm commitment of the country to strengthen the implementation of local policies for the prevention and eradication of child labor, using as a basis the results disaggregated by sex of the Child Labor Risk Identification Model at the territorial level and involving to the municipalities ”.

To achieve this result, the ILO -together with ECLAC- have been providing technical assistance to the country in the implementation of the model on the basis of official information collected by different public bodies (known as administrative records), which will make it possible to distinguish sub-territories. (canton, municipality, etc.) according to their level of vulnerability to child labor and identify the main factors associated with such vulnerability. This methodology will allow Costa Rica to have disaggregated information to design focused and articulated multisectoral responses of a preventive nature to interrupt the trajectory of child labor.

One of the advantages of the model applied in Costa Rica is its relative simplicity, which will allow the country's technical teams to appropriate it and integrate it into the usual statistical processes for decision-making, thus achieving timely information with a cost-effective application. -efficient.

This model is an instrument developed within the framework of the Regional Initiative Latin America and the Caribbean free of child labor (IR), of which Costa Rica is a founding country and it is hoped that the information obtained will allow it to advance in its objective of declaring itself a country. free of child labor by 2025.

Facts and Figures on Child Labor in Costa Rica

In Costa Rica, according to the National Household Survey (2016) 30,369 boys, girls and adolescents between 5 and 17 years old are employed. The main activities in which this population works are agricultural (33.2%), followed by commercial (26.7%). Likewise, it highlights that the highest percentage of boys and male adolescents work in occupations that do not require qualification and that the highest percentage of female girls and adolescents work in services and commercial sales and markets.

The persistence of child labor, especially of a dangerous nature and in high-risk sectors, represents an obstacle in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean to prepare and take advantage of the human talent that will make the future of work fair, inclusive and sustainable. we aspire.

For this reason, the ILO has proposed, in the year of its Centenary, to decisively promote a new generation of policies focused on prevention and action at the local level, in which, at the same time, the learning and knowledge of the actors, as well as the resources of the programs and services already existing in the countries, articulating them more efficiently and adapted to the particularities of child labor at the local level and responding to the needs of the most vulnerable groups.