The photos are deeply disturbing: children picking through garbage, selling cheap little trinkets, cleaning gravestones in the cemetery. In one picture, a child begs for spare change from a passing motorist. He is so small he can barely reach the window of the car.

“Look, the tragedy of child labour is not only in Asia or Africa. It’s in Europe too,” says Stavri Liko, Executive Secretary of the Trade Union Federation of Education and Science of Albania,  and coordinator of the child labour prevention program run cooperatively by both national teacher unions, FSASH and SPASH.

The unions estimate that 10,000 Albanian children are working as street vendors, 3,000 are labouring in the informal construction industry, and 4,000 are reduced to picking over garbage. Liko is emotional about the problem and passionate about the need for solutions.

“When you see children working on the streets like this, something moves you inside,” he says. Liko believes it’s everyone’s obligation as a human being to care about children who are denied access to education and forced to work – often in exploitive conditions. As well, it’s every teacher’s professional duty to try to keep students in school and maximize their life potential.

Thanks to support and solidarity from the Dutch teachers’ union AOb and the Netherlands labour centre FNV, the Albanian teachers have succeeded in creating an innovative program to prevent and eliminate child labour by keeping children in school. For the past two years, the Albanian unions have worked in collaboration with their Dutch colleagues, as well as the ILO and IPEC. Their slogan is “No turning back” in the teacher unions’ engagement on child labour.

Andre Dumont, international secretary of AOb, says the child labour prevention program has had substantial success. A key strategy is to train teachers in ways to support children who are at risk of dropping out of school, and help them successfully intervene to prevent dropouts, he said.  All of this work is carried out in the context of the Education for All goals, he added.

Today, 60 schools in four districts are involved and 1,000 teachers volunteer in the program on top of their regular classroom jobs. They monitor the children who are absent, offer informal classes to children at home, educate parents about the importance of keeping their children in school, and cooperate with parents and community members to make school attractive and meaningful in children’s lives through setting up clubs and sports. 

They also offer a program called “Second Chance” for children who have been in the work force but would like to re-enter school. Many adolescents who have not had access to education are reluctant to come to school because they are much older than primary classmates. But through the Second Chance program, they can take their primary studies with peers closer in age.

The good news is that about 1,400 students who were labouring on the streets, in factories, as domestic servants, and in a variety of other ways have now been re-integrated into school.

To highlight the problem of child labour in Albania and the dedication of teachers work together to help prevent it, EI commissioned a photo exhibit which was mounted at an education trade fair in Utrecht. The photos won a prize for most innovative project.

Plans for the future involve working not only with the teachers’ unions, but with those representing industrial workers, construction, garment industry, shoe manufacturing, agriculture – sectors where large numbers of children are labouring.

“We want to lobby these employers not to hire children, to keep them in school,” he explained.