Impact

 

Children of the Sacadas

Victorias City, Philippines — This city is home to Asia’s largest sugar mill, and the surrounding towns are home to 14 others. This area has the largest concentration of sugar mills in Asia, a testament to its fertile plains and the source of its wealth. 

Supporting this wealth are thousands of seasonal farm workers, called sacadas, who plant and harvest the sugarcane. These men, women, and children toil under feudal conditions, earning anywhere from 500 to 1,000 pesos ($10 to $20) a month, depending on their volume of work.  

“Poverty is the root of child labor,” said Sister Maria Victoria P. Santa Ana, a nun who is also executive director of the Laura Vicuña Foundation (LVF), a group working to end child labor in the Philippines.  “Children are expected to be additional farmhands, and parents set aside their education in order for the family to survive.”

The government estimates that among the country’s 77 million people, there are 4 million children who work. About 70 percent of these working children, who range in age from 5 to 17, are in rural areas, like the children who toil on the sugar plantations of Victorias and other towns in the province of Negros Occidental.

Sister Maria Victoria and her volunteers focus on education as their main means of eradicating child labor in the sugar plantations. LVF was started in 1990 by the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians (the Salesian Sisters) and lay professionals. LVF helps about 2,000 street children annually in the Philippine capital of Manila. In 1998, it opened a new training center in a sugar plantation in Victorias, about a one-hour plane ride south of Manila.  

“No single intervention is a perfect solution to end child labor,” said Sister Maria Victoria. “However, nobody can contest the effectiveness of educating people as the best way of addressing child labor.”

From 2004 to 2006, with funds from The Global Fund for Children and other supporters, LVF helped educate 588 children in Victorias and the surrounding towns. An additional 705 children and their parents were given an introduction to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, with 205 given further training as child rights advocates.

LVF provides scholarships to send children to primary school and vocational training for out-of-school youth. Those who want to finish high school are enrolled in the government’s Alternative Learning System (ALS). This system enables such youth as Emily to work and to study for their high-school diploma at the same time. As a child, Emily had to give up her dream of being a teacher because she was needed to nurse her ailing mother and mind her three siblings while her father worked in the sugarcane fields.

While employed as a domestic worker, Emily was recommended for the ALS program. Her parents, fearing the loss of her income, did not allow her to enroll at first. Eventually, they relented. Emily is now waiting for the results of her exams—and then planning to study further to become a teacher.  

 

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