Child Labor and Associated Problems (The Case of Damot Gale District In Wolaita Zone)

Abstract

The study was carried out at Damot Gale district of Wolaita zone in Southern nation nationalities regional state with the main objectives to describe factors of child labor in the study area. In order to attain this objective the study made use of cross-sectional household survey data collected from 94 sample households .The data collected were analyzed and discussed by using descriptive statistics and binary logit regression model. To this end, identifying children’s who were in child labor and those who were not in child labor; descriptive result shows that from different age category a total of 69(73%) of the children’s were engaged in different activity and the remaining 25(27%) responded as not working. Most children started working below the age of 8 and major sectors of work were unpaid family work such as agriculture (58% M &7.24 % F ) and Home service (7.3% F & 22% M). The result of the logistic regression model revealed that out of 8 variables included in the model, 4 explanatory variables were found to be significant at 1percent, 5percent and 10% percent level. Accordingly, family size and loss of parents were found to have positive association with child labor and statistically significant up less than 1% and 10% respectively. Meanwhile occupation status of the parents and education level of were found out to have strong negative association with child labor and statistically significant up to less than 1 percent level of significance.

Key words: Child labor, logit model, Damot Gale District.