President Juan Manuel Santos said Friday that more needs to be done to stop child labor in Colombia.
“We will make a great effort to make sure that child labor will not exist in this country. There are still many children who are being recruited by unscrupulous people to work. The children should not be working. They should be studying,” said Santos in a message on the presidential website.
According to Santos, child labor must be eradicated through tougher applications of existing laws and with special zones of vigilance in parts of the country where child labor is particularly common.
Santos added that Colombia has made progress in all of the United Nation’s “Millennium Goals” aimed at diminishing poverty worldwide, except when it comes to child labor.
According to Santos, the “Families in Action” program, a conditional cash transfer initiative that gives nutritional and educational subsidies to the children of very low income, displaced and indigenous families, will form a key part in the fight to keep children out of the workforce.