canadian artists for the poor

Education

Poverty and lack of education go hand in hand. Of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty today, 70 per cent are women who were denied the opportunity to go to school as children. These women had their childhoods stolen from them as they were kept home to fetch water, cook, clean and care for younger siblings or sent off to work. Currently, there are an estimated 218 million children ages 5 - 14 engaged in child labour. Among other things, this labour includes factory work, mining, farming, the military use of children and prostitution.

In the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations states that it is :

the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.

In papers prepared for the 1997 International Conference on Child Labour, it was established that child labour can best be combated through:

• Better access to education (with little or no cost to poor families)

• Social awareness and activism

• The rehabilitation of child labourers
  
  
• Legislation and proper enforcement of child labour laws
  

canadian artists for the poor recognizes that education helps to break generational poverty. That is why we seek to support charities that offer education services for children. The child that is in school is many times safer, more cared for and has more options that his or her non-educated counterpart.

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