LUSAKA, ZAMBIA An entrepreneur in Zambia who received support from the Finnish government uses children to sort waste.
Even school-age and younger children collect garbage in the entrepreneur’s yard and help their parents sort it.
Children work without protective equipment. Around them hovers the plague, which is created from the plastic being melted in the yard.
This became apparent when visited the Plastpave Zambia company last week in Zambia, near the capital Lusaka.
The visit was part of a training program organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, the purpose of which was to introduce journalists to development aid in Zambia.
Plastpave Zambia, which received investment support from Finland in 2023, recycles waste and manufactures, for example, furniture and fence posts from packaging plastics.
“Kids like a lot of rubbish”
When arrived, about a dozen children were visually sorting the waste.
When the visit officially began and the owner of the company Lwenga Mulela began showing the area to the reporters, the children and their mothers had already left work.
According to Mulela, it is not about the exploitation of child labor.
– We don’t have child labor because they are not paid anything! Children like trash anyway and they get to keep the cookies they find. They come here with their mothers,” Mulela said.
At the moment, the company is mainly processing packaging plastics for cookie packages, which Mulela has received for free from a local company.
Protective equipment was missing
The use of child labor is relatively common in Zambia. According to a report by the US Department of Labor, about 7.8 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 14 in Zambia work.
Drawing the line between, for example, helping parents and financial exploitation of children is difficult and case-specific.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), child labor can be considered when the work is physically or psychologically harmful to the child’s development and when it affects the child’s opportunities to attend school.
When visited the Plastpave Zambia company, schools in Zambia were closed because there was a cholera epidemic in the country. Some of the children digging through waste were clearly under school age.
The children and their mothers did not seem to have the necessary protective equipment for waste handling, such as gloves or coveralls.
– Don’t go walking in the waste because you don’t have protective equipment, CEO Mulela instructed journalists when presenting his company.
Children and adults worked near metal dams where plastic is melted before being cast into a new shape. None of the employees saw had respirators.
The company’s CEO did not worry about the potential health effects of the vapors rising from the dams.
– The gases are not so dangerous because the work takes place in the open air. In addition, employees are checked by a doctor every three months, Mulela stated.
According to him, the company’s employees have been offered protective equipment, but they don’t want to use it because of the heat.
The CEO interviewed by talked about his company quite openly and seemed to be completely unaware that the company’s operations do not necessarily meet the criteria for responsible business operations.
The project was outsourced to a consulting company
Finland has helped Plastpave Zambia with an investment grant worth 30,000 euros, which was used to acquire equipment for the company to process waste plastic.
The company has not been given money directly, but it has been bought, for example, a truck, a digital scale and a plastic shredder.
The company’s owner, Lwenga Mulela, has also visited Finland to network and learn about local waste management.
Plastpave Zambia is one of the 369 Zambian companies that Finland supported in the years 2018–2023 through the AGS project. visited two supported companies in Zambia.
The goal of the AGS project led by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been to accelerate the growth of small and medium-sized companies in Zambia and to create more economic connections between Finland and Zambia.
The project, which ended at the turn of the year, also had development policy goals. It aimed to promote Zambia’s circular economy and improve the position of women in business life, among other things.
Support for Zambian SMEs was distributed for a total of nine million euros.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs selected the Niras Finland consulting company as the project implementer through tendering.
The company, which was managed by Tikkurila in Vantaa, assembled an international team in Zambia, which began to implement the project of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In practice, the role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was to guide the general progress of the project and to approve the grantees based on the proposals of the consulting company.
Since the support was distributed among hundreds of companies, Finnish officials visited only a fraction of all the companies that received support.
“Let’s get to the bottom of it”
After the company visit, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has begun to find out why children litter the yard of a company supported by the Ministry.
– The Ministry of Foreign Affairs takes this very seriously. The matter will be thoroughly investigated. Who are these children and why has this not been reported to us? commented the person responsible for development cooperation at the embassy in Lusaka Jan Koivu.
– We also have to see if local laws have been broken here, Koivu continues.
According to him, it is still too early to say that Finland has supported the use of child labor in Zambia.
– It is clear that children should not be in the production area and that the safety of all employees should be carefully taken care of. This is the starting point from which the matter has now been investigated, says Koivu.
On Tuesday, it was not yet known whether any of the consultants of the company that organized the project in Zambia had visited the Plastpave Zambia company after the company received the equipment it needed.
Koivu hopes that things will be clarified as soon as possible.
– There are now several things that are worrying and about which we need to get more information. It is perhaps good to remember that responsible business operations and workers’ rights are in their infancy in Zambia, and that is partly why development cooperation is carried out here, Koivu states.