The director against child labor of the Ministry of Labor, Roderick Chaverri, in an interview with Radio Panama said that our country is well positioned in terms of the eradication of child labor, but that we must not lower our guard to achieve the real objective of zero child labor
“The Republic of Panama is the Latin American country with the best perspective for the eradication of child labor, only the Ministry of Labor has coordinated various actions, including raising awareness among professionals and students, to that we must add what the Secretary does of Children, with the Social Security Fund, with the Ministry of Education, with the Police for Children and Adolescents and we make prevention tours throughout the Republic where we join the Ombudsman’s Office “he stressed
Chaverri considers that inter-institutional work has helped a lot when they receive cases of children working in the streets: “If we find a child in a situation of child labor in the street, we immediately verify if they are in school and coordinate with MEDUCA, the attention of health, we see family accompaniment through the Children’s Secretariat, we begin to train the parents of these children either with training at INADEH if they do not have any profession or if they have a technical profession we incorporate it into the job market from the MITRADEL employment office, we try to give an answer within our possibilities, always based on the main interest of the child”.
Even the model currently followed by MITRADEL is being copied by Central American nations, such as Guatemala: “We have constant meetings with the ILO and today we have a meeting with personnel from the Guatemalan Ministry of Labor who have asked us for guidance on the subject of child labor, where we will give you a tour, the ILO has asked us for our model of technical risk sheets and the Department of Labor of the United States recognizes the work of the Republic of Panama, we are very well positioned technically, we know what is needed much, but the goal is the eradication of child labor in the near future”, he concluded.
