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This article reports on a study that investigated the effectiveness of child labour laws intended to promote child rights and the protection of children from unfair and forced labour. Legal scholars distinguish between child work and child labour: forced child labour manifests itself in abusing children sexually, forcing children to work on farms, and compromising children's rights to education. Although South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia have laws in place to protect children from child labour, the abuse of children continues in these countries. Furthermore, although these three countries are signatories to conventions of the International Labour Organization that seek to eliminate child labour, they have been unable to stem the tide of child labour. This article argues that there is a need for the three countries to work closely together to implement policies that reverse or fight against child labour. The researchers used a qualitative methodology to interpret the variations in the application of child labour laws. They found there are no harmonised laws to deal with child labour in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Hence, this article recommends that an independent supranational organisation be established in Southern Africa to monitor, evaluate, and implement progressive laws to eradicate child labour in line with internationally recognised best practices as set out in child labour laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate the relationship between children's cognitive ability and parental investment using a rich dataset on a cohort of children from Ethiopia. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term international study of childhood poverty in four countries. Ability is measured by scores on a cognitive test. A child's enrollment in school, participation in work and work hours are employed as measures of parental investment in human capital. The results provide strong evidence of reinforcing parental investment - higher ability children are more likely to be enrolled in school and less likely to work and, conditional on participation, also work fewer hours. These results are mostly robust to addressing potential feedback effects between schooling and test scores and household heterogeneities. On the policy front, the results suggest that the seeds of adulthood inequality in human capital and earnings capability may be sown quite early in childhood, and thereby underscore the importance of interventions that, among others, attempt to improve prenatal and early life health and nutrition, which are often cited as the sources of deficiencies in children's cognitive ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]