Iraqi refugees who flee to Syria are not allowed to work in the coun­try legally. This leaves the refugees hav­ing to work ille­gally for what are often less wages than nor­mal. Chil­dren often have to find work because their par­ents strug­gle and often find them­selves in harsher conditions.

From IRIN, we read more about the strug­gle that Iraqi refugees have to earn a living.

Aseel Ali*, aged 16, and her mother — both refugees from Iraq — earn just enough (US$174 per month between them) in a Dam­as­cus hand­i­craft work­shop to pay their rent and buy food.

“I have to help my mother as our sav­ings ran out,” Aseel told IRIN. “We start early in the morn­ing and fin­ish at 4pm, and also take work home,” she said.

Aseel’s fam­ily fled to Egypt in 2006. In 2007 her father went back to Iraq for a short visit but has since gone missing.

After their sav­ings dried up, the fam­ily returned to Iraq in Jan­u­ary 2009 on one of the free government-organized flights designed to stim­u­late returns, but the fam­ily received fresh death threats and Aseel’s 12-year-old brother was kid­napped and tor­tured. Once he was released, his mother decided they should flee again — this time to Syria.

Aseel has not been to school since she left Iraq in 2006. In Egypt, pri­vate schools were beyond the family’s means and when they arrived in Syria, where Iraqi refugees have free access to edu­ca­tion in pub­lic schools, she could not attend school as she needed to earn money for the fam­ily to survive.

Accord­ing to a Novem­ber 2007 sur­vey by the IPSOS mar­ket research agency, 37 per­cent of Iraqi refugees inter­viewed said their main source of income was their sav­ings; 24 per­cent relied on remit­tances; and 24 per­cent on wages; 33 per­cent expected their money to last less than three months; 53 per­cent did not know how long their money would last.

Lack of data on child labour

There are no up-to-date sta­tis­tics on child labour among the refugee pop­u­la­tion, but offi­cials and the refugees them­selves think the num­ber is on the rise. Not allowed to work legally, Iraqis receive very low wages and find it dif­fi­cult to make ends meet, offi­cials say.

A young Iraqi woman IRIN met at the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Douma reg­is­tra­tion cen­tre who pre­ferred anonymity said many Iraqi chil­dren where she was liv­ing were not going to school. “They work in dif­fer­ent jobs to sup­port their help­less fam­i­lies,” she said.

The IPSOS sur­vey esti­mated that about 10 per­cent of school-age Iraqi chil­dren in Syria are working.

The Syr­ian gov­ern­ment has also rec­og­nized that child labour is becom­ing a wide­spread phe­nom­e­non among Iraqi refugees, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in its child pro­tec­tion strat­egy 2008–2009, quot­ing a paper pre­sented by the Syr­ian gov­ern­ment to an inter­na­tional con­fer­ence on Iraqi refugees in Geneva in 2007.

School dropouts

“Fam­i­lies have spent their sav­ings and are becom­ing increas­ingly des­ti­tute. There are indi­ca­tions that more chil­dren are drop­ping out of school and enter­ing the labour mar­ket to help sup­port their fam­i­lies. Early mar­riages for girls are also on the rise as a result of eco­nomic hard­ship,” UNHCR pub­lic infor­ma­tion offi­cer Farah Dakhlal­lah told IRIN.

“Accord­ing to gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics, there were fewer Iraqi chil­dren reg­is­tered in the 2008–2009 school year than in the pre­vi­ous year. We believe this is pri­mar­ily linked to eco­nomic duress, as well as reset­tle­ment and returns,” Dakhlal­lah said.

The Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion said there were 32,425 Iraqi stu­dents offi­cially enrolled in the 2008-09 school year com­pared to 49,132 in 2007-08.

New study

In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Min­istry of Social Affairs and the Inter­na­tional Labour Orga­ni­za­tion (ILO), UNICEF has launched a national study on the worst forms of child labour in Syria, UNICEF child pro­tec­tion spe­cial­ist Theodora Tso­vili told IRIN. “The study will take three months and will include Syr­ian, Pales­tin­ian and Iraqi chil­dren,” she said.

“Only with this study will we get updated infor­ma­tion about this phe­nom­e­non. We have esti­mates that school dropouts are linked to child labour, but we don’t have proof. We need this study to back up any future response,” she said.

(* not her real name)

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