From war to sweatshop for Syria's child refugees

“He can make 400 shoes a day,” says the factory manager. “He’s a real man.”

Only he’s not. Aged just 13, Hamza is in fact a child. And so are more than a third of the workers in this sweatshop.

This is no anomaly. According to Unicef, more than half of Turkey’s 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees are children – and nearly 80% of them are not in school. Across the wider region, Unicef estimates that half of school-age Syrians – 2.8 million children – have no means of accessing education.

Campaigners believe that many of the rest are in work, for salaries far below the minimum wage. In the southern city where Hamza lives, extensive surveys by local aid groups suggest that the city’s Syrian schools have capacity for just 21,000 school-age Syrians, well under a third of the local total.

“The other two-thirds are definitely all working,” says Kais al-Dairi, director of theSyrian Relief Network, the coalition of aid groups that conducted the research. “And of the 21,000, according to the teachers, many of them sometimes leave school early. They say: ‘I have a job, I must support my family.’”

With this situation replicated in hundreds of cities across the Middle East, Dairi says the harm done to vast numbers of Syrian children – some of whom have spent half a decade out of school – is by now irreversible. “Even if everything stopped now and we had peace, we would just be doing damage control,” says Dairi. “We have lost a generation. We are trying not to lose a second one.”

Hamza’s life is a good example of why this is all happening. Two years ago, his father was reportedly beheaded by Isis fighters in northern Syria, so his family fled to Turkey. There, his mother works as a housekeeper for the family’s elderly landlords, in exchange for a lower rent. But with Hamza’s father dead, the family has no other means of earning a money. So to put food on the table, he and his younger brothers, Tarek and Hammouda, work in this local shoe factory. Their daily wage is less than $10 – lower than the retail price of every pair of shoes they make.

“I would love to go to school, I miss reading and writing,” says Hamza. “But if I go to school, nobody is going to bring food to my home.”

At their spartan one-room home nearby, Hamza’s mother nods in agreement. “They have to work,” she says of her children. “If they don’t work then we can’t live.”

For researchers at Hayata Destek, a Turkish non-governmental organisation that works with Syrians, Hamza’s predicament is familiar. According to their surveys of Syrians in Istanbul, 60% of Syrian families have a household income between 500 and 1,500 Turkish lira (£120-£360) a month. “But when you look at what they spend per month, it’s around 1,600,” says Gonca Girit McDaniel, a programme coordinator at Hayata Destek. “They’re spending more than they earn, and so they have to borrow money – or let their children work.”

Source: The Guardian
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