Migrant children and dependants

Types of ZSR

How ZSR can be implemented:

Ensure effective access to primary, secondary and further education for children of migrant workers in existing local schools and/or dedicated migrant schools near zones.
Develop dedicated routes for migrant children into SEZ employment, such as through appropriate vocational skills training programmes for those aged 16 and above, or through apprenticeship schemes Support provision of appropriate and affordable childcare facilities for the below-school-aged children of migrant workers in or near the SEZ, to ensure migrant parents can work without compromising children’s safety.
Ensure a range of accommodation options, beyond multiple-occupancy dormitories, are available for migrant workers to support the co-migration of dependent family members.

Overview of the problem:

When labour migration is successful, it can lead to the transfer of economic and social gains to the origin community, especially when migrants send remittances to their hometowns and villages to support dependant parents, children and other relatives. When migrants return to their towns and villages of origin, they also bring money and skills with them that are used to support relatives and improve conditions for entire communities. However, these positive outcomes may be undermined by lack of access to essential services for children and other dependents in the destination, or by long-term separation from dependents owing to the conditions of migration.

Migration is often not a solo activity. Many men and women who migrate to SEZs for work bring children with them, and sometimes other dependents, including their own elderly parents who may provide childcare or need care themselves. Accessing local schooling in their destination can be difficult for migrant children, even where they are citizens of the country where the SEZ is located (and still more so where they are cross-border migrants). Problems in accessing schooling include the seasonal or circular nature of some migration; lack of the documents necessary for school enrolment, including identity proofs, birth certificates, local address registration and others; high fees charged to non-locals; and/or discrimination by communities and institutions in the destination. Sometimes, alternative education providers, for example NGOs or informal grassroots organisations, emerge; but these may be of low quality or face hostility from locals and/or the state. Children without access to local schools may drop out of education, instead engaging in child labour or remaining unsupervised at home. These disruptions to schooling can lead to negative life outcomes, with children unable to gain skills that would support decent employment in the longer term.

Finding childcare for below-school-aged children in and near SEZs can also be difficult. With no reliable source of childcare, migrant parents may be forced to bring migrant their children into unsuitable worksites, leave them with an older sibling (often to the detriment of the older child’s schooling), or leave them with someone they do not know well. Each of these options is potentially dangerous for the wellbeing of the child. Sometimes migrant women are forced to drop out of the labour force to care for infants, or may be relegated to lower-skilled, informal or home-based activities.

Alternatively, where lack of education, childcare or other essential services preclude migration of children, migrant workers may leave children behind in villages to be cared for by grandparents or other kin. However, long separation from parents also poses challenges for the wellbeing, supervision and education of left-behind children, while their care may additionally place undue burdens on relatives who may themselves be suffering from the out-migration of the household’s main able-bodied adult. Where mechanisms for remittance-sending are irregular or weak, the left-behind household may also suffer financial deprivation in the absence of the primary wage earner.

Occasionally, dependent adults may accompany the wage earner to the destination, especially where they need regular care or are able to provide childcare, but this is made difficult by a lack of suitable family-oriented accommodation in or near the SEZ. Since dependents cannot easily be housed in factory dormitories or multiple-occupancy hostel rooms, migrant families may end up living in informal shanty-towns, in squalid or even hazardous conditions.

Examples:

Adani Ports and SEZ, Mundra, India

The children of migrant workers in APSEZ in India’s Gujarat state have struggled to enter local state schools, in part because of their parents’ patterns of labour migration which make continuous school attendance difficult, and in part because of discrimination from local institutions. One local NGO has created a successful and sustainable model of providing free education to migrant children as well employment to migrant (and some local) women as teachers (Majmudar, 2017). The NGO runs schools for three types of migrants, including a permanent school for the children of migrants from other parts of India who work in the SEZ and port; a seasonal school for children of migrants belonging to the Gujarati fisher community who spend nine months a year in the area; and an informal school for children of migrant salt-miners who follow their contractors between salt mines (Yusuf Meherally Foundation, 2019). The NGO also trains migrant women to become teachers and has helped them to complete undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in education.

Despite its success in educating migrant children and empowering migrant and local women, the NGO has struggled to develop positive relations with some parts of the local bureaucracy, which has not always regarded in-migrants in a positive light (Majmudar, 2017). It has benefited from building good relations with national and international donors, though, including receiving donations as part of CSR by the Adani Foundation, the charitable arm of the SEZ developers (Adani Foundation, 2022).

Khed City, India

There is formal provision of vocational training for migrant (and local) young people near India’s Khed City SEZ, in Maharashtra state, through a government-funded Industrial Training Institute. The private founders of Khed City provided sponsorship as a form of SCR, including establishing specific courses relating to the skills needed and types of work available in the zone (Bharat Forge, 2024). However, graduates were disappointed that these courses often did not lead to actual employment in the SEZ, with new migrants typically preferred for jobs and no formal pathways set up to link training to job placements. Many found alternative employment in factories outside Khed City.

Liaoshen Industrial Park, Uganda

Since pregnancy termination is illegal apart from in exceptional circumstances in Uganda, unintentionally becoming pregnant was a major motivator of migration for unmarried women into Liaoshen Industrial Park. These migrant women sought to provide for their offspring, as well as to save funds for their own further education and/or future small business development. However, lack of appropriate facilities at the worksite, where workers were typically accommodated in onsite dormitories or in shared rental accommodation with no available childcare, meant that they were unable to bring infants with them to the SEZ (Goodburn, Knoerich, Mishra & Calabrese, 2024). Most therefore relied on their own mothers in their area of origin for childcare, and endured long-term separation from their child while remitting a substantial portion of their wages. Young women who became pregnant while working at the zone were mostly dismissed from their positions, as is common across Uganda (Zake, 2022).

Hawassa Industrial Park, Ethiopia

The workforce at Ethiopia’s Hawassa Industrial Park, which is predominantly composed of young migrant women working in garment factories, has been impacted by a shortage of early childhood care and education. Concern over the safety and security of below-school-aged children has led to high rates of absenteeism as well as lower productivity and higher turnover, as well as hampering women’s long-term participation in the labour force (3blmedia.com, 2023). In 2021, international NGO Plan International, together with commercial partner The Children’s Place, established a new affordable childcare centre which was projected to be able to accommodate 1,000 children at full capacity, with staggered hours for early, midday and evening shifts (Plan USA, 2021). As well as providing essential childcare for migrant workers, the centre is planned as a conduit for job creation for local communities, by training local women and offering them jobs in early childhood development (Chua, 2021).

The case of China:

Large-scale labour migration in China transferred economic and social gains to the origin communities through remittance-sending and eventual return migration, which contributed enormously to the development of China’s interior provinces during the 1980s–2000s. However, the great majority of migrants in China are unable to access state schooling or other forms of state childcare in their destination areas, including SEZs. The key mechanism of their exclusion is the hukou (household registration) system, an institution that has functioned as a migration control and social benefits distribution system since the 1950s (Yang and Chan, 2023). Since each person’s hukou is attached to a place, only local hukou-holders have full access to the key public services, including education. Until 1993, rural-urban migrant children were banned from city state schools, and from 1993 high fees were charged to non-locals (Goodburn, 2009).

After the abolition of fees in 2008, documentary barriers became the main mechanism for excluding those without local hukou: to enrol in state schools, migrant children need multiple official documents, which few have. They are also required to take entry examinations based on different curricula; face strict quota systems; and are practically barred from attending senior high school and taking college entrance examinations in most megacities (Ling, 2019). Most migrant parents therefore send their children to expensive migrant-run private schools, the majority of which are unregistered, of dubious quality, and represent a significant burden to migrant parents. Furthermore, unlike in many developing countries, in China the state predominantly opposes the provision of private education to migrants, and frequently closes down schools (Goodburn, 2020).

Many children of migrants therefore do not migrate with their parents but are instead left behind in the place of their hukou registration where they can access schooling (Murphy, 2020). This pattern has given rise to much concern about the impacts of long-term familial separation and its impact on children’s psychological development and education (Hu, Lu & Huang, 2014; Sun et al, 2015), as well as the possibility of risks to children’s health and safety where grandparents or other relatives are unable to provide high-quality care (Ma et al., 2019).

China-associated zones overseas

There are no distinguishing features that set China-associated SEZs apart from other SEZs when it comes to dependants of migrants. Usually the provision of childcare, maternity leave, and migrant access to local institutions such as schools and hospitals come under the purview of the host-nation.

Types of ZSR