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30 JUNE 2010
NO 1596
Scavenging
"My mother works very hard and earns
very little. It is my responsibility to help. When there is no food to
eat,
my mother and I go to the dump to look for food." (13-year-old boy)
Scavenging has been defined as "the manual sorting and picking of recyclable and reusable material from landfill and dumpsites for the purpose of personal use and income"1. Scavenging also includes the picking of food for personal consumption. This study, drawing on international literature as well as from interviews with scavengers, found that most of those who engage in scavenging are from poor backgrounds, are unemployed and cannot find employment, and that the engagement with this form of work is generally a response to chronic poverty.
Every day Naledi wakes up before the sun comes up. It is too dark to tell what time it is. She washes, eats a slice of bread, drinks a cup of tea and accompanies her mother and sister to the Stortfontein dumpsite in Emnambithi, KwaZulu-Natal. Naledi’s mother and sister scavenge on the dumpsite for food to eat, clothes to wear and metals to sell to the recycling companies nearby. Naledi is brought to the site to take care of her sister's baby. She sits under a clump of trees from early in the morning until after five each evening. She says she is forced to do this work because everyone else in the house is working on the site. Naledi is only 5 years old.
Magdalene is 21 years old and lives in a shack on the Goudkoppies sites in Eldorado Park. At the time of the interview, Magdalene had been working on the site for a year and was five months pregnant. She met the father of her baby on the site. Magdalene lives on the site where she has no access to water, electricity and sanitation facilities. On days when she has no food, she scavenges on the site for food. She spends up to nine hours a day working on the site carrying heavy loads of recyclable material to recycling companies that are about 1 km away. Her main wish is not to raise her child on the site, but at the moment she cannot see an alternative.
These stories were captured in a research study commissioned by The South African Child Labour Programme of Action into the nature, causes and consequences of children scavenging on landfill and dumpsites. The study found that there were no quantifiable national data on the number of children scavenging on such sites. This study conducted interviews with 75 children who were scavenging on landfill and dumpsites in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. The researchers estimated that one in every four people scavenging on the studied dumpsites or landfills is a child between the ages of 4 and 18 years.
Why do children turn to scavenging?
Some of the children interviewed in the study who lived with their
parents, said that their parents were either unemployed or employed in
low paying jobs like domestic work or farm work, or scavenging. Many had
come from rural areas in search of formal work and had settled in
informal settlements. Having been unable to gain formal employment, the
adults and children were introduced to scavenging through others living
in the informal settlements. Where the children lived with a
grandparent, they survived mainly off the grandparent’s pension,
supplemented through scavenging.
Children generally tend to have a strong psychological connection to family, as it is the first formal social structure they are exposed to. Hence they form strong social bonds with members of the family unit, which result in a strong sense of responsibility towards their family. In some of the studies conducted internationally and confirmed in this study, it was found that children have a deep respect for their parents, recognising that their parents feed them, nurture them and take care of them. A 13-year-old boy working on the Msunduzi landfill site in KwaZulu-Natal said, "My mother works very hard and earns very little. It is my responsibility to help. When there is no food to eat, my mother and I go to the dump to look for food." Some children also mentioned that they were expected to assist their parents in bringing in an income. In this study, the children stated that they felt they had a strong obligation to take care of their parents or their families.
Most of the children interviewed said that the money they received for the work they did was given to the adults in the household. While a few children indicated that they sold the materials to recycling companies themselves and pocketed the money for their own personal use, there were some children who didn’t get paid for the work they did, and seemed to perform this work with their parents who did the selling of the materials to recycling companies. International literature has pointed to the fact that children who engage in scavenging activities often contribute up to 50% of a household’s income, either directly or through the amount of recyclable materials they collected.
The study also revealed that the majority of those children interviewed had entered scavenging as a form of work either on the day or month of the interviews taking place or earlier on in the year. This indicates that scavenging on dumpsites and landfill sites is easily accessible to children as a means of generating an income for their households. Many of these children end up staying in this work for up to 10 years. Taken together with some of the adult interviews where some adults had done this work for up to 35 years, this indicates that there is no natural exit out of this work: without deliberate interventions to get children off the dumpsites, most of them will remain on these sites for many years.
In some cases the children stated that they no longer go to school because their families cannot afford to pay their school fees and other school expenses, and many of the children interviewed have been removed from school by their parents.
SARANEL BENJAMIN
Benjamin, S. (2007). South Africa's invisible
children. Children First, 11, 65. pp. 22-24.
NOTE
1. This definition is taken from the ILO (2004). Addressing the exploitation of children in scavenging (waste picking): A thematic evaluation of action on child labour. Geneva.
