News blog

Missing out on an education, healthcare and proper nutrition, child workers are denied their right to a childhood. With no chance to play and exposed to exploitation, they are forced to grow up much too fast.

In Pakistan, one of the most common places to find these children is in brick kilns. The statistics are appalling:

• 3.8 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour.
• Children work for 14 hours a day, six days a week for as little as £40 a month.

Even worse, these children are bonded labourers, so over half of their small salary is taken by their employers as payment for long-standing family debts. Bonded labour is a huge problem in Pakistan, with entire extended families trapped paying off debts which just keep increasing.

Sidra is 10, and works in this brick kiln in Pakistan with her little sister Rabia

The risks and how ActionAid is helping

Conditions in the brick kilns are dangerous. The manual labour required to make bricks is gruelling - severe injuries and even death are not uncommon. With little food or healthcare - as well as high levels of disease including cholera and diarrhoea - children are put at high risk. Many of these children work in the kilns alone as a result of trafficking or because, in some cases, their parents have sent them away to make a living for the family. They are isolated and vulnerable, and are deprived of their basic rights to food, healthcare and an education.

The situation is severe, but there is hope for these children. ActionAid is working in Pakistan, helping to get children out of the brick kilns and into informal education. Our Pakistan Priority Project works in 60 brick kilns, reaching 5,000 brick kiln workers with legal aid and health services as well as helping 600 children get out of them and into primary education for the first time, giving them back their childhood and hope for the future.

On Tuesday we hosted our latest Blogger Meet Up with ActionAid ambassador, mum, actress and cookery writer Fay Ripley. Fay was joined by ActionAid's  Kenyan activist Joy Mghoi Mwakisambi; and founder of digital community #NFPTweetup Rachel Beer; as well as lots of fantastic bloggers.

Fay kicked off the night by talking about her inspiration for sponsoring a child through ActionAid. After getting fed-up with the money spent on goody bags at children’s paries, her daughter Parker and her decided that for Parker's next birthday they would collect money for a more meaningful cause instead.

She vividly described a visit to see ActionAid's work in action - and the relationships that can be built through child sponsorship, stating, “ActionAid makes me feel like there’s more to life than my little island and my little street.”

The theme of the evening was food and Fay also chatted about her experience as a food writer and the importance of food in her life, considering our relationship with food and the issues that arise around world hunger.

Joy then spoke passionately about what it’s like to live in poverty and go hungry every day, contrasting life in Kenya with Britain. She talked about the Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign, encouraging people to do their bit to end world hunger. With nearly a billion people going hungry worldwide, meaningful action is well overdue. As Joy said, “Let’s join hands and fight for enough food for everyone together!” Her rallying cry was for everyone to come to the Big IF event on Saturday 8 June – you’re invited too!

Rachel Beer discusses blogging with event guests

Finally Rachel Beer got the conversation going on the relationship between bloggers and charities - and about the importance of mutual interest and authenticity. This naturally led onto time for bloggers to meet – some face-to-face for the first time and to discuss the issues that made them decide they’d come along. It was an inspiring evening!

Read more about the experiences of blogger Damien Clarkson and from Rosie over at alittlelusciousness.com blog.   

Huge thanks for all the bloggers for coming along and making it a great event:

babesabouttown.com  @babesabouttown 

febgirl.co.uk @joelle_o

alittlelusciousness.com  @alusciousness

missielizzie-meandmyshadow.blogspot.co.uk  @missielizzieb

thesheepandthegoats.co.uk @missdeg

cfangus.wordpress.com @CFangus

lovelearncook.com @lovelearncook

thepgk.wordpress.com @wildscribe

teamawot.com @notrollergirl

cocktailsandcaroline.com @CocktailsandCaz

pressedfrench.wordpress.com @PressedFrench

damienclarkson.wordpress.com @damienclarkson

ActionAid has long been calling for an end to burning food as fuel in our cars, an outrage when one in eight people go to bed hungry every night, and we have now been joined by a group of prominent MPs. The International Development Committee today released its report on Global Food Security in which it concludes biofuels cause hunger and western governments need to do something about it.

Biofuels – burning food crops as fuel – cause hunger in a number of ways. They reduce the amount of food available to eat, pushing up food prices. And they encourage land grabs, because people are forced off their land to make way for biofuels plantations, leaving them unable to grow food to feed themselves or sell to earn an income.

For example, in one case in Tanzania where ActionAid has been working for 16 years, a biofuels company arrived in Kisarawe District in 2011 taking land the size of 11,000 football pitches to establish a plantation of jatropha – a plant used in biofuels - driving people from their homes with little or no compensation.

The cross-party committee who wrote today’s report say that small scale farmers should be central to global food production. These producers, particularly women, play a key role in feeding people and reducing rural poverty – and should be supported to do so.

The committee’s report adds that EU rules which require 10 per cent of transport energy to be drawn from renewable sources by 2020 should in fact exclude agriculturally-produced forms of fuel, such as biofuels.

This important report comes just days before David Cameron hosts the international ‘Nutrition for Growth’ event in London this weekend, and prepares for the wider G8 Summit in Northern Ireland a week later. At both events, Mr Cameron has a unique opportunity to encourage his fellow world leaders to acknowledge that biofuels cause hunger. ActionAid continues to call on the Prime Minister to support a move to decrease the EU cap to 5 per cent.

Failure to act now will lead to rising food prices for us all and negative impacts for the world’s poorest people.

The massive tornado that hit Oklahoma city is a reminder of the devastating power and unpredictability of natural disasters, and the death and destruction that follows in their wake – even in the richest country on earth. Yet the Oklahoma tornado is just one incident. A Guardian graphic shows the impact of disasters worldwide in 2012, reporting that more than 32 million people fled their homes last year because of disasters such as floods, storms and earthquakes – and that 98 per cent of displacement was related to climate change.

ActionAid always responds to natural disasters in communities where we work and a roll call of recent disasters shows just how important that is: the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the Haiti earthquake and the Pakistan floods all required massive coordinated and collaborative relief responses. Yet just as important is work to encourage resilience within at-risk communities.
 
In particular, the effects of climate change – floods, cyclones and crop failures – are growing and have a much bigger impact on people in poor countries because they don’t have the resources to protect themselves. They suffer the most, even though they have contributed the least to global warming.
 
That’s why we’re working with communities in vulnerable areas to help them adapt to natural disasters caused by climate change. And with more and more poor families living on marginal land, it’s a development field that ActionAid is investing in. We’re helping communities identify the risks they face that make them vulnerable and we're developing their skills to push their governments to provide the services that will help them survive in a world where climate change is making the world a less safe place.
 
ActionAid has placed reducing vulnerability to disasters at the heart of our emergencies work and it makes a difference. Just recently my colleague Alice Klein reported that when Tropical Cyclone Mahasen passed through Bangladesh casualties were thankfully minimised. Much of that was due to investment by the Bangladesh government and aid agencies. Millions living in low-lying coastal areas in the Bay of Bengal were evacuated and ActionAid had three emergency teams on standby in the coastal region where we have many sponsored children.
 
Helping small communities cope with increasing stresses and shocks is also a reason why we’re a member of the Global Network for Disaster Reduction which seeks to put poor people at the heart of responses to disaster risk reduction. As ActionAid’s advisor on disaster resilience, Jessica Faleiro has written about how empowered people are able to strengthen their own communities to be better prepared and adapt to rapidly changing environments.