Impact of “Food for Education Program” on Child Labour incidencein Tribal Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

Abstract

This study assesses impact of Food for Education program on child labour incidence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s tribal districts. These districts formerly comprised Pakistan’s FATA, which was affected by a protracted conflict that resulted in human, public and infrastructure losses. The tribal districts that now encompass the FATA region share many socio-economic characteristics. Moreover, the FATA region was recently affected by a large scale conflict that resulted in large numbers of its inhabitants getting killed, as well as destruction of public and private infrastructure and loss of livelihoods. This also resulted in limiting access to the region. Keeping this in consideration asample size of Purposive sampling, 427 children were selected from Mohmand Tribal district. The dependent variables were children involved in schooling, those involved in child labour, and household chores. Explanatory variables included children, parents and household socio-economic characteristics. The analysis was done using descriptive statistics and a multinomial logit regression technique. Results show that the FFE program significantly reduced child labour incidence.