Experts and stakeholders on decent working conditions have called on the federal government to bring on board specific, strong and effective legal frameworks to help mitigate abuses targeted towards domestic workers in Nigeria.
Speaking at a roundtable on Situation of Domestic Workers in Nigeria by the Bayero University Kano’s Centre for Gender Studies in collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the experts acknowledged the lack of legal framework and weak institutions for the implementation of scattered legislation on domestic work as top two contributing factors to the abuses against domestic workers in the country.
One of the speakers at the discussion, Dr Muhammad Nuruddeen, the Head of Department of Public Law in BUK, noted that since poverty and illiteracy are the major factors pushing more people, especially women and children into domestic servitude, there is a need for a visible and proactive institutional mechanism to ensure the implementation of the laws as well as capacity building for domestic workers to let them know their rights.
Nuruddeen said over 83 million people are in the domestic work sector worldwide with women and children the majority, especially in Nigeria, yet there is “No specific legislation at the national level regulating domestic work. What we have are scattered laws. They are not in a single document. But despite some of these provisions in different legislations, rights of the domestic workers are denied.”
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On his part, Professor Sani Lawal Malumfashi of BUK’s Department of Sociology, who spoke on the role of stakeholders in mitigating abuses against social workers, said the ministry of education at both federal and state levels must ensure that all school-age children in the society are enrolled in schools while the Ministry of Labour and Productivity should have a directorate on informal sector employment for proper regularization and documentation of informal works in the urban sector.
In their separate addresses, the Vice Chancellor of the institution, Professor Sagir Adamu Abbas, and the Director of the Centre for Gender Studies, Dr. Suwaiba Sa’id Ahmad, while noting the aptness of the topic, adding that despite their importance, domestic workers face a lot of challenges, including low wages, extra working, long working hours, lack of holidays and sometimes sexual exploitation, physical abuse, ill-treatment and lack of welfare, and BUK is concerned with the welfare and wellbeing of all humanity, especially the vulnerable.
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