Mentors form Cotabato City anti-child labor bloc

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — A campaign against child labor, supported by international assistance, has now extended to Cotabato City.

Launched on Friday by a 30-member group, the initiative aims to tackle the issue affecting local communities.

The group, comprised of three supervisors, a child protection specialist, 17 formal teachers, nine alternative learning system teachers and a focal person from the Cotabato City Schools Division under the Bangsamoro education ministry, finished on Friday a three-day workshop on Supporting Children’s Rights through Education, the Arts and the Media, or SCREAM project.

The SCREAM project, aiming to address via educational interventions child labor and use of children as combatants, is now being implemented together in a number of towns in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao and in its capital, Cotabato City, by the Integrated Resource Development for Tri-People, the International Labour Organization of the United Nations, the government of Japan, and BARMM’s education and labor and employment ministries.

Workshop facilitators Erlie Josefa Babayen-on, a district supervisor in the Cotabato City Schools Division and her officemate, Ricardo Austial, Bai Sara Jane Sinsuat, who is director of the Bureau of Employment, Promotion and Welfare of the Ministry of Labor and Employment-BARMM, and Elias Salazar, ILO’s project officer for the Bangsamoro region, took turns lecturing the anti-child labor team for this city on the intricacies of their missions.

The SCREAM project has 14 modules, contents discussed during the workshop by facilitators that also included Ahmad Aleef Pulong and Tu Alid Alfonso from BARMM’s education ministry and IRDT’s director, Kalma Jikiri-Isnain and her staff Ayrin Sala-Sales.

“We are thankful to all who helped facilitate this three-day activity,” Salazar said.

Sinsuat said the MoLE-BARMM is all out in supporting the implementation of the SCREAM project in the Bangsamoro region, where there is widespread problem on child labor, condoned by poverty due to decades of secessionist strife and children’s lack of access to schools.

“The MoLE-BARMM is doing its best to address child labor in the autonomous region via its regular ministry programs and this multifaceted SCREAM project,” Sinsuat said.

Sinsuat and Babayen-on were in a group that studied handling of the SCREAM project in Bangkok, Thailand last month.

SCREAM project’s newly-formed 30-member group in this city have sworn to work hard in addressing child labor here in a symbolic rite last Friday that capped off the culmination of their three-day workshop on their additional tasks as employees of the Cotabato City Schools Division.