Seven children and a young man drowned in the Nile returning from a poultry farm where they worked for a wage of EGP 50, and eight children drowned in a canal returning from a potato station, while the state punishes whoever employs a child with a fine not exceeding EGP 1,000, and after the child’s death pays EGP 120,000.
On the evening of Monday 10 January 2022, a pickup truck carrying 23 workers drove onto an unlicensed ferry crossing the Rosetta branch from the village of El-Qatta in Monshaat El-Qanater district in Giza to Ezbet El-Tafteesh, part of the village of Talia in Ashmoun district in Menoufia. Most of the passengers were children aged between 13 and 17, ten girls and 13 boys, who had just finished a day’s work at a poultry farm where they collected eggs. The driver lost control of the brakes as he drove the truck onto the deck of the ferry, and it slid off the other side and fell into the river, according to the investigations of the Giza investigative police. Fourteen survived and eight drowned, seven of them children: Saeed Saad El-Tanani, Hagar Abdel Samad, Doaa Nabil and Nada Ahmed Hassan, each of them 13, Shorouk Yasser, 16, Ziad Ahmed Hassan and Zeinab Abdel Moamen Abdel Aziz, each of them 17, and Mohamed Sabry Salem, who had passed childhood by a single year, according to the list of victims published by local newspapers.
River rescue forces recovered seven bodies over the following two days, while Shorouk remained under the water for seven days in the depths of the cold, until divers found her on 17 January, and her family recognised her by her hair after the water had altered her features. Like her peers, she worked as a day labourer for EGP 50 (about $1.6 at today’s rate), and she had gone out to the farm, as her family told journalists, to buy a jacket for her little brother to protect him from the winter cold. Her mother did not leave the site of the accident all week, waiting for her daughter’s body to be buried in the family tomb rather than be carried away by the current.
The Public Prosecution moved quickly along the path it knows: it detained the owner of the ferry, three of its workers and the driver of the truck, Ahmed Maher Saeed, for four days pending investigation on charges of causing death, operating a boat without a licence and loading passengers onto a goods vehicle in violation of the law. Then the detention appeals judge at the North Giza Court renewed their detention for 15 days on charges of the involuntary manslaughter of eight children and endangering the lives of 15 others. The charge sheet, as published by the newspapers, made no mention of whoever employs 13-year-old children on a poultry farm for 12 hours a day, nor of whoever contracts a driver to transport them every evening across the river in the back of a pickup truck. That is another crime under Egyptian law, but its penalty is not worth bringing a case over: a fine of no less than EGP 500 and no more than EGP 1,000 per child.
One Child in Twenty
No one in Egypt has a recent figure for the number of working children in the country, because the last specialised national survey of child labour dates back to 2010, when it was conducted by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) with the International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour. That survey found, as summarised by Al Jazeera last December, that 1.6 million children were engaged in child labour, that is 9.3% of Egypt’s children, one child in ten; that 82.2% of them worked in poor and unsafe conditions; that 16.9% worked more than six hours a day; and that agriculture accounted for 63% of them, followed by mining, construction and manufacturing at 18.9%, then services at 17.6%. The state has not announced a new national survey since then, so the figure that opens every official statement on child labour has remained a figure that is 13 years old.
What is available instead is a side indicator in the Egypt Family Health Survey, which CAPMAS conducted in 2021, releasing its preliminary results on 30 August 2022 and its final results on 20 March this year. Between the two releases the figure changed: in the preliminary announcement, the head of the agency, Major General Khairat Barakat, said that the rate of child labour among those aged five to 17 stood at 5.6% in 2021 compared with 7% in 2014, and that the frontier governorates recorded the lowest rate (2.6%) and rural Upper Egypt the highest (8.4%, compared with 10.4% in 2014). Then the final results came to say that the rate was 4.9%: 6.8% among males and 2.8% among females. Whichever of the two figures is correct, what the health survey measures is a single question within a questionnaire on childbearing, nutrition and circumcision, not a survey that counts working hours and the nature and risks of the work, and it can therefore be compared with the 2010 survey only with caution. What is certain is that at least one child in every twenty in Egypt works, that in rural Upper Egypt the rate approaches one child in every twelve, and that two-thirds of them work in fields and farms, where no labour inspector reaches and no law applies.
An Unbroken Chain
The drowning of the children of Talia was not an exceptional incident but a link in a chain that repeats itself with the same details: a vehicle not intended for carrying passengers, an unsafe road or crossing, a daily wage ranging between EGP 30 and EGP 50, and children on their way to a farm or returning from one. Just 100 days after the accident, at dawn on Saturday 30 April 2022, a three-wheeled motorcycle carrying 14 people overturned into the Sahel Morqos canal in front of the bridge of the village of El-Sawalem in Itay El-Baroud district in Beheira; they were returning from work at a potato sorting and packing station in the El-Tawfiqiya area. Eight children from the village of Nakla El-Enab, aged between 13 and 14, drowned, named by the newspapers as: Mohamed Amin El-Abd, Hady Hisham Badran, Salem Mohamed Ali Salem and Ahmed El-Sayed Taha Obeid, each of them 13, and Abdel Rahman Reda Khalifa, Mohamed Abdel Moneim Shaaban and Ahmed Ezz El-Assiouty, each of them 14. The prosecution ordered the detention of two defendants, and a member of parliament asked why the area had not been made safe, but no one asked why 14 children were returning from the potato station at dawn.
One month before the Talia accident, in December 2021, two children were killed and 24 people, most of them children, were injured when a quarter-ton truck overturned on the Dawawis link of the El-Qassasin road in Ismailia. They were on their way to a farm to harvest onions, and their ages ranged between ten and 15. It is the same link road that saw the death, in March 2019, of a 19-year-old girl and the injury of 16 children who were on their way to farms on the desert road. In May 2021, two children were killed and 21 injured when a quarter-ton truck overturned on the Western Desert Upper Egypt road as they were returning from work at one of the farms in the desert hinterland. In August 2021, a child was found hanged in a cemetery in Atfih; he had been working on a tuk-tuk to support his disabled father, and three people killed him to seize the vehicle. Four incidents in 14 months, in four governorates, all involving children from the countryside, and the same means: the back of a truck.
This chain intersects with another structure of neglect: the ferries. After the drowning of the children of Talia, MP Mohamed Abdallah Zein El-Din, a member of the Transport Committee of the House of Representatives, said that the ferries spread along the Nile across the country’s governorates are dilapidated and unfit for transporting people and property, that Egypt has nearly 10,000 ferries serving about 144 islands along the river, as well as villages separated from others by one of its two branches, and that all of them are in dire need of immediate maintenance or of replacement with bridges. The authorities’ response to the accident came in the form of money and a promise: President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi directed the prime minister to build a bridge for the residents of the area to prevent a repeat of the accident, and ordered the Tahya Misr Fund to disburse EGP 20,000 (about $650 at today’s rate) to the family of each person who died; the Ministry of Local Development allocated EGP 500,000 to Menoufia Governorate to support the families after a social assessment, and the Governor of Menoufia disbursed EGP 120,000 (about $3,900) for each person who died. In other words, the state valued the life of the drowned child, after drowning, at the equivalent of the wage for about 2,400 days of work on the poultry farm, while its law valued the penalty for employing that child alive at the wage for 20 days.
From El-Qatta to the Quarries
Agriculture is the largest sector of child labour in Egypt, but it is not the most dangerous. On the eastern side of Minya Governorate, across about 300 square kilometres, hundreds of white limestone quarries producing bricks and building materials operate, and children work in them on electric cutting saws and crushers and in loading stone blocks. An investigation published by the ARIJ network last September, following field visits between December 2021 and March 2022 and the examination of 50 children, documented that 84% of the sample had suffered cuts while working; that the records of the health unit in the village of El-Dayaba registered injuries to between 30 and 40 children a month in the first months of 2022, most of them work injuries according to the unit’s nurse; that a count conducted by the Wadi El-Nil Foundation for the Protection of Quarry Workers and published by the Quarry Workers Syndicate in 2019 identified 115 children injured as a result of working in the quarries; and that children make up about a fifth of the workforce in this sector. The investigation told the story of Mahmoud Atef, a 13-year-old boy who works under a stone-cutting machine for a wage that reached EGP 50 a day, and who stumbled while loading stones onto trucks and cut his right eyebrow, then returned to the quarry every morning with his younger brother.
Cuts are only the visible effect. An investigation by the newspaper Al-Shorouk in 2014 documented that more than 16,000 children aged between 15 and 18 were working in the Minya quarries without employment contracts, for a daily wage of EGP 80 and “blood money for death” of EGP 1,000, and that employing them in blasting the mountains with dynamite had cost dozens of them their lives and left dozens of others with permanent disabilities. The reporter took a 15-year-old child who had been working in the quarries since the age of nine to the clinic of Mohamed Ali Moussa, professor of chest diseases at Minya University, who found that he had severe inflammation of the throat, nose and larynx and chronic bronchitis; the doctor explained that the limestone dust and asbestos extracted from the rock cause hardening of the lungs, which may end in cancer. In the same year, the labour office in Minya issued 500 violation reports across the 3,000 quarries it visited, for operating without a licence, employing children and using explosives, that is, one report for every six quarries, with a fine not exceeding EGP 1,000.
Quarry owners do not hide their logic. One of them, named Hussein Abdel Hady, told the Masrawy website in May 2019 that employing those under 18 is a way of cutting costs, because the wage of a single worker can employ three children who do the same work and more. The quarries lie at the heart of what International Convention No. 182 describes as the worst forms of child labour, but Ahmed Moselhy, head of the Child Defence Network, told the same investigation that the meagre fines applied deter no one, and called for the penalty to reach five years’ imprisonment for quarry owners’ exploitation of children.
Between the field and the quarry stretches a long list that every Egyptian city knows: children in carpentry, blacksmith and mechanics workshops, in brick kilns on the outskirts of Giza, in rubbish sorting, in street vending on market pavements and in train and metro carriages, in fishing in the Burullus and Manzala lakes, and in domestic service, where girls work whom no one sees. Agricultural work itself is taking on increasingly industrial forms: poultry farms that use minors for cleaning, feeding, and collecting and packing eggs; potato and onion sorting stations; and cotton fields, which are among the oldest sites of child labour in Egypt, so much so that previous governments, as an expert reminded Al Jazeera, used to grant pupils in villages known for cotton cultivation an exceptional holiday to help their families harvest the crop, so that child labour was a declared education policy, not a violation to be caught.
The Law That Values a Child at EGP 1,000
On paper, Egypt has a complete legal system. Article 80 of the 2014 Constitution obliges the state to care for children and protect them from all forms of commercial exploitation, prohibits employing them before they pass the age of completing basic education, and prohibits employing them in work that exposes them to danger. Article 64 of Child Law No. 12 of 1996, as amended by Law 126 of 2008, prohibits employing children before they reach the age of 15 and training them before 13, and prohibits employing them in any work that endangers their health, safety or morals, in particular the worst forms of child labour as defined by Convention 182. Yet the same article opens the door through which the entire countryside enters: it allows the competent governor, after the approval of the Minister of Education, to license the employment of children aged from 12 to 14 in “seasonal work that does not harm their health or development and does not disrupt their regular attendance at school”, a description that, in the eyes of any governor, applies to harvesting cotton and gathering potatoes and onions.
The Labour Law No. 12 of 2003 regulates the employment of children in its Articles 98 to 103: no employment before reaching the age of completing basic education or 14, whichever is higher; no more than six hours a day, interrupted by a rest period; no overtime or night work; and a register of the children’s names and the nature of their work, to be approved by the administrative authority. But Article 248 of the same law sets the penalty for violating all of this at a fine of no less than EGP 500 and no more than EGP 1,000 (between $16 and $32), multiplied by the number of children and doubled in the event of a repeat offence. On 7 December 2021, one month after the Ismailia accident and one month before the Talia accident, the Cabinet approved a draft law to toughen these penalties so that the fine would range from EGP 1,000 to EGP 2,000, with the establishment closed for six months in the event of a repeat offence, a toughening that raises the price of a child from $30 to $60. It had not been issued at the time of writing, while the draft new labour law approved by the Senate remains pending in the House of Representatives.
More important than the smallness of the fine is whom the law excludes from protection in the first place. The labour law does not apply to domestic servants or to members of the employer’s family whom he actually supports, and the provisions of the chapter on the employment of children do not apply to children working in purely agricultural work, that is, to the sector that includes two-thirds of the country’s working children. Thus the child who collects eggs on a farm or harvests onions in a field is, by the letter of the law, outside the reach of the labour inspector, and if an inspector does reach him, the most he can do is issue a violation report with a fine of EGP 1,000, and no one is held to account for the pickup truck that transports him unless it falls into the river.
Egypt ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, ILO Convention No. 138 on the minimum age for employment in 1999, and Convention 182 on the worst forms of child labour in 2002, and in July 2018, together with the organisation’s Cairo office, it launched the National Action Plan for Combating the Worst Forms of Child Labour and Supporting the Family 2018-2025. The then Minister of Manpower, Mohamed Saafan, said at its launch ceremony that child labour is a crime that must be stopped. In June 2022, Eric Oechslin, director of the organisation’s Cairo office, said that the organisation was implementing, with Dutch support, the project to accelerate the elimination of child labour in supply chains in Africa, and that the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood had begun implementing it with the organisation in the Egyptian cotton supply chain. Five years into the national plan, which ends in two years, there is not a single public report saying how many children have been withdrawn from work, nor a single survey saying how many children have entered it.
Three Decades of Programmes
The current national plan is not the first attempt. Between 2004 and 2006, the Ministry of Manpower, with the World Food Programme, UNICEF and the International Labour Organization, implemented a project to withdraw 4,300 children from the labour market in three governorates. According to the results published by the organisation and the ministry, 632 children were returned to primary education, 3,830 enrolled in literacy classes, 5,108 in community schools and 2,005 in vocational training centres, 371 children were withdrawn from the worst forms of work, social services were provided to 2,938 children, health services to 600 and financial assistance to 236, and 1,653 awareness sessions were organised. These are figures that seem large until they are measured against their yardstick: over two years, the entire project withdrew from the worst forms of child labour a number close to the number of child injuries that a single health unit in the village of El-Dayaba records in one year.
Then came the National Plan 2018-2025, which defined the worst forms it targets: practices similar to slavery such as the sale of children and forced labour; the use of a child in prostitution or the production of pornographic material; the use of a child in illicit activities such as the production of drugs; and work that harms the child’s health and psychological well-being. The child who collects eggs for 12 hours, or loads stones onto the saws, barely appears in this definition except in its last item, which is the item a labour inspector does not carry in his pocket when he enters a farm, if he enters it at all. The International Labour Organization estimates, according to what was reported by the Diraya Center for Studies, that every increase of one percentage point in the poverty rate is matched by an increase of no less than 0.7 points in child labour rates, an equation that makes the figures of the past two weeks an advance reading of what will happen in the fields during the coming season.
Poverty in the Figures of July 2023
It is difficult to understand the persistence of this phenomenon without looking at the figures released two weeks ago. On 10 July, the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics announced that annual urban inflation had reached 35.7% in June, the highest level since measurement began, and the Central Bank announced that core inflation had reached 41%, and food and beverage prices rose 64.9% in a single year, after the pound lost half its value against the dollar since March 2022. The latest official poverty figure dates back to the 2019/2020 Income and Expenditure Survey, which said that 29.7% of Egyptians were below the poverty line, that is, before the pandemic, before the war in Ukraine and before three currency devaluations. In 2018, when poverty stood at 32.5% by the agency’s own calculation, Hassan El-Khouly, professor of sociology at Ain Shams University, told the Al-Monitor website, commenting on the Talia accident, that rampant poverty is the main reason behind child labour in Egypt, and that poor families usually force their children to leave school and work to earn a living.
The state’s response to this poverty is the Takaful and Karama cash support programme, whose beneficiary families number, according to the financial statement for 2023/2024, more than five million after the value of the support was increased by 25% as of last April, at an annual cost of EGP 6.4 billion. Upper Egypt accounts for more than 70% of its families, and “Takaful” requires the family to have children in pre-university stages of education and that they attend school regularly. The monthly support for a family amounts, according to Minister of Social Solidarity Nevine El-Kabbag, to between EGP 620 and EGP 740 ($20 to $24). Here lies the equation that governs the rural family’s decision: a child who works as a day labourer for EGP 50, like Shorouk and Mahmoud Atef, brings his family EGP 1,300 in a month of 26 working days, that is, double what the programme, conditional on his staying in school, pays. With food inflation exceeding 60%, the father in Talia or Nakla El-Enab does not need a lecture on children’s rights to know which of the two to choose.
Children’s entry into the labour market is linked to their exit from school, and the Egyptian countryside knows both paths. The 2017 census revealed that a quarter of the population over the age of ten is illiterate, and large poor families tend to withdraw their children from education early to work, while working children prefer earning a living to attending lessons that lead to nothing tangible. The conditional programme itself offers evidence of the size of the gap: the Ministry of Solidarity said that 2.26 million children from Takaful and Karama families are enrolled in schools, a figure read as a success, but it also means that the regular schooling of millions of children has become dependent on a monthly cash transfer that prices devour. Neither the 2021 health survey nor any other official statistic has an answer to the question every incident raises: how many of the children who drowned in El-Qatta and El-Sawalem were enrolled in a school, how many of them had left it, when, and why no one noticed.
What the State Knows and What It Does Not Want to Count
The state knows exactly where its children work. The 2010 national survey identified the sectors and governorates; the 2021 health survey established that rural Upper Egypt has the highest rate and that boys outnumber girls by more than two to one; and press investigations identified the quarries by name, the villages by name and the health units that record children’s injuries every month. The state has the tools: the Child Helpline 16000 run by the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood; labour inspectors, 911 of whom were trained in international labour standards between November 2013 and March 2018, according to a study jointly conducted by the International Labour Organization and the Ministry of Manpower; a national plan with a set end date; and a cash support programme that reaches five million families. What it lacks are two things: the will to count its working children accurately every few years through a specialised survey, not a passing question in a health questionnaire; and a law that makes employing a 13-year-old child for 12 hours on a poultry farm cost the farm owner more than EGP 1,000.
Between the two, the scene with which this investigation opened remains the truest picture of the whole matter: a state that pays EGP 120,000 for each child after he drowns, but does not pay what would keep him in school before he drowns; that detains the truck driver and the ferry owner, but does not ask who employed the children and who transported them every evening across the river in the back of a truck. Up to the date of publication of this investigation, Zawia3 found no official announcement of the opening of the bridge that was ordered after the accident, no published ruling in the El-Qatta ferry case, and not a single violation report filed against whoever employed the children of Talia or Nakla El-Enab. What the successive accidents prove, from El-Qatta to El-Sawalem to Dawawis, is that village children are still transported every morning in the backs of trucks to the farms, because EGP 50 a day is still more than the state is able to give them in return for staying in school.
