I'd like to thank the committee for this opportunity to appear. As UNICEF Canada, we welcome this opportunity to address child labour and supply chains. I understand the ILO has already addressed the scale and scope, and you've already heard from Walk Free and World Vision around some of the legislative issues, so I'll seek to address and touch on some of the other issues that I believe are of interest to the committee.
The first of these is around root causes. A couple of years ago, UNICEF Canada conducted a study of the root causes of child labour in artisanal and small-scale mining in western central Africa. It appeared that there were three main groups of root causes: social norms, lack of protection and support, and limited public and private sector engagement.
In terms of social norms, this includes valuing income over education and valuing boys over girls. In terms of lack of protection and support, that includes lack of access to education and increased gender and environmental vulnerabilities. In terms of limited capacity, that includes weak child protection systems, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and also lack of private sector engagement on this issue.
That's why UNICEF takes a system strengthening approach, and the Government of Canada also needs to take a system strengthening approach to address child labour in supply chains and provide solutions that are truly sustainable. In one instance, UNICEF in Burkina Faso removed over 20,000 children from artisanal and small-scale mining over a period of five years and placed them in education, training, and employment opportunities.
There's an additional context that the committee should consider, and that relates to fragile states and also emergencies. Global Affairs Canada has supported work in response to typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, whereby UNICEF-trained police officers and other enforcement agencies identified and responded to child trafficking as a result of that emergency. We're seeing disturbing reports of that pattern being repeated with the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh right now.
I had the privilege of visiting refugee camps in Jordan, where we see major issues around child labour, because the adults are not allowed to work, and they're not allowed to leave the camps. Moves have to be taken to prevent those children from going into child labour.
As well as that, we're also looking at specific security context, so we welcomed the recent announcement of the Vancouver principles to address the recruitment of child soldiers, which ILO Convention 182 identifies particularly as the worst form of child labour. As a result, we now need a multi-sector approach to address these specific forms. One example is where Global Affairs Canada, together with UNICEF and the mining company, Barrick Gold, have produced a child rights and security checklist to address child soldiers and child security issues in volatile contexts.
The second issue is around the garment industry, and this has already been touched on by my colleagues at World Vision. The root causes I've already identified are also evident in the garment industry. Bangladesh and Vietnam are the second and fifth largest global exporters of garments. Both employ approximately four million workers, and 80% of those workers are women. The majority of those workers are domestic migrants moving from rural to urban locations to work. In two UNICEF studies in the last two years, we've identified that the major issues they face are lack of maternity protection, little support for breastfeeding, limited child care options, poor health, nutrition, water, sanitation, hygiene, education, and protection. The list goes on, and combine that with low wages and long hours. This should be a concern to business because this affects employee productivity. It affects employee loyalty, absenteeism, turnover, and ultimately business reputation and profitability. This is relevant to this study because these all contribute to child labour, particularly in the 15-, 16-, and 17-year-old age range.
Bangladesh and Vietnam have been relatively successful in eliminating some of the child labour in global supply chains, but in the domestic garment industry in those countries, we still see a very worrying prevalence of child labour. In one particular area, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, of 169,000 workers, 59% of them were under the age of 18, so that also needs to be addressed. That's why UNICEF is implementing a factory engagement program to engage with global retailers, national suppliers, and local factories to address some of these issues.
This brings me to my third point about the important role of the private sector. It is essential to eliminating child labour, and we have to work with them together. Where there is no legislation, companies are already moving to fill the gap. We've seen that in several examples, particularly in the extractive sector. Following civil society pressure, for example, around child labour discovered in cobalt artisanal and small-scale mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we're now seeing that major companies have begun to map their detailed and complex supply chains, from artisanal mine, through the traders, through the smelters, up to the suppliers and the industrial mining. So it is possible.
We've also seen, for example, industry come out and actively advocate for transparency legislation. If you look at the 2014 Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act, the mining industry actively advocated that so they would have to disclose the payments that they make to governments.
We saw a couple of months ago the Mining Association of Canada require as part of their membership criteria that all member companies independently verify that their mines don't use child labour. Some of those companies are already voluntarily complying with the U.K. and California supply chain requirements. This therefore demonstrates the need, and I echo the comments my colleagues made around the need for Canadian legislation. Europe, California, and Australia are leaving Canada behind, and the private sector is already filling the gap.
In conclusion, I would say that, in line with general comment number 16 of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Government of Canada should require business to publish how they have addressed slavery and forced labour, and in line with the UN guiding principles, the Government of Canada should ensure that this requirement includes the identification of a policy commitment, a due diligence process, and access to remedy, which is approved at the most senior level, which is applicable across business supply chains, and which is accessible publicly, and that in line with children's rights and business principles, which the Government of Canada has endorsed, the government should support business in this regard as part of a wider approach to taking a holistic child-rights-centred approach to all of its programming and activities overseas.
Thank you very much.