The Jordan National Child Labour Survey (NCLS) 2016 has been implemented by the Centre for Strategic Studies, University of Jordan, in consultation with the Ministry of Labour and the Department of Statistics of the Government of Jordan. Technical and financial support was provided by the International Labour Office (ILO) under its project “Moving towards a Child Labour Free Jordan (JOR/10/50/USA)” funded by the United States Department of Labor1 in which the Ministry of Labour is the national partner.
The primary objective of the project and the NCLS 2016 is to provide an updated and comprehensive database on child labour in Jordan to support the creation of an enabling environment to combat child labour, by building on achievements made already in the country and to continue complementing other initiatives of the Government of Jordan and civil society aimed at reducing student drop-out from basic education, improving working conditions for youth, and progressively eliminating child labour. The findings of the Jordan NCLS 2016 shall facilitate also the process of informed and targeted policy making by the Ministry of Labour and Ministry of Social Development to combat the underlying factors leading to children labour.
The Jordan NCLS 2016 is a successor to the Child Labour Survey 2007 of Jordan that was also supported by the ILO, but is an advance in several respects. First, the survey estimates incorporate the guidelines and statistical measurement standards on child labour and relevant statistics of working children as contained in the Resolution concerning the statistics of child labour adopted in December 2008 at the 18th International Conference of Labour Statisticians. Second, the survey covered children within the age of 5 to 17 years. Third, to provide robust estimates of child labour within Jordan, the entire resident population of Jordan including migrants and refugee households was the survey target population. This last point is very relevant and important since the ground situation in Jordan over the past few years has been considerably altered due to the large influx of Syrian refugees.2
Due to these methodological improvements in the Jordan NCLS 2016, it is not strictly correct to compare the findings in this report to the estimates contained in the report on the Child Labour Survey 2007 of Jordan (except for the percentage of working children).
In recent years, Jordan has taken significant steps to to strengthen its policy responses to child labour. A Child Labour Unit has been established within the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry also chairs the National Committee on Child Labour (NCCL). In 2011, the Prime Minister approved the National Framework to Combat Child Labour (NFCCL), the implementation of which is being supported by the ILO. The NFCCL is designed to integrate efforts to combat child labour among the Ministries of Labour, Education, and Social Development to effectively tackle the identification and referral of child labour across Jordan. And in 2014 the Juvenile Law No. 32 was adopted by the Parliament resulting in a bigger role for the Ministry of Social Development in addressing child labour and the creation of a Child Labour Unit there as well.