Hamid[1] parked his truck as close as he could to the bombed-out building on the outskirts of Taiz where he’d noticed a displaced family living under a canopy of cloth material they had managed to scavenge and affix to the walls that were still standing in the ruined structure. He’d been wanting to help them for months, and now, finally, he had a food basket to deliver to them through a distribution organized by a local non-profit.
“Peace be upon you,” he called out, as he opened the truck door.
The head of household emerged from his makeshift shelter and made his way down the short path to where Hamid had begun unloading items from his truck. “I’ve brought your food basket, brother,” Hamid said as he turned his back to get another item. When he turned again, Hamid was surprised to see the man sitting on the ground in the middle of the path—weeping. He set down the sack in his hands and went to sit beside the man. Together they stared at the flour, beans, rice, oil, salt, and hygiene items that Hamid had just unloaded.
“I used to have a shop in the city where I sold stuff like this,” the man said after he composed himself. “We had a house, and I made enough to take care of my family. But our neighborhood turned into a frontline when the war started, and we had to flee. We lost everything. Now, I spend all day collecting plastic and metal cans to sell, but what I earn is not enough to fill our stomachs. Finally, I let my daughter go out and start selling water on the streets so we could have a little more…”
The man’s voice broke, and he hung his head.
“This war has made us all do things we never thought we’d do,” Hamid said.
“My daughter was my life,” the man whispered and turned to look at Hamid with haunted eyes. “One day, she went out to sell water, and she didn’t come back. I’ve been out searching for her every day for three months now, while my wife sits here waiting and imagining the worst. Our daughter is 17 and she’s deaf. I can’t stand to think of what’s happened to her.”
Hamid closed his eyes and swallowed. A knot formed in the pit of his stomach as thoughts about the girl’s fate flashed through his mind. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “May God bring her back to you,” he said softly.
“In all these years of war and all these months of searching for my daughter,” the man said, tears streaming down his face again, “this food basket you’ve brought is the first sign I’ve had that someone cares about us—that someone sees all this pain in my heart. Thank you for this kindness.”
After nine years of war, many parents around Yemen have come to share the pain of this missing girl’s father as they have been forced to make unthinkable choices. In December 2023, more than half of surveyed households across Yemen lacked access to adequate food—a nine percent increase nationwide compared to November and a four percent increase compared to the beginning of 2023. Furthermore, around 58 percent of the surveyed households had adopted extremely negative food-coping mechanisms during December—marking a 12 percent increase during 2023.[2] Among these extremely negative coping strategies that can have detrimental and irreversible consequences, is child labor. Like the family Hamid reached outside the city of Taiz, another family his non-profit assisted in 2023 had already resorted to sending their 14-year-old son out to sell water in the street. Unfortunately, he was struck by a car and spent two weeks in the hospital. While he was still at home recovering in the care of his mother, who was five months pregnant, his father died tragically in a separate incident.
That 14-year-old was already out selling water before his father died. However, it is often the loss of a father or other primary caregiver that drives Yemen’s children to labor in unsafe conditions. In 2022, UNICEF produced a short clip that tells the story of a 12-year-old boy in Taiz who began working 11-hour days in an iron workshop after his own father died.[3] In early October 2023, more than a year and a half later, a brief Al Jazeera report on Yemen’s working children revealed that little had changed in spite of peace talks that were dominating the international news about Yemen at the time.[4] Besides street vending and welding, other types of work that children have taken up to stave off hunger in Yemen include guarding qat[5] or associated agricultural work that exposes them to pesticides and may force them to carry weapons, stone cutting and quarry labor, construction, automotive repair, fishing, garbage collection, domestic service, and restaurant and motel service. Children in hungry households are also particularly vulnerable to child trafficking networks that prey on vulnerable children. Thus, girls and boys have been internally trafficked to Yemeni cities for forced labor, domestic service, street vending, and to work as unskilled laborers or for commercial sexual exploitation. Yemeni children are also reportedly trafficked to Saudi Arabia where they are compelled into forced labor and forced prostitution.[6]
The International Labor Organization (ILO) has declared that “Child labor is a violation of fundamental human rights and has been shown to hinder children’s development, potentially leading to lifelong physical or psychological damage.” Moreover, the ILO explains that “child labor perpetuates poverty across generations by keeping the children of the poor out of school and limiting their prospects for upward social mobility.”[7] Yet today that fate is closing in on increasing numbers of Yemeni children.
According to the Yemen Information Center, the number of children working in Yemen in 2014 was between one million and 1.5 million. In 2023, the Center reported that those figures are believed to have quadrupled over Yemen’s nine years of war.[8] Like the 17-year-old girl with a hearing impairment who disappeared selling water on the outskirts of Taiz, many of those boys and girls will face outcomes that remain unknown and untold in a world of crises clamoring for attention. What we do know is that if aid workers like Hamid—active in and around Taiz and all across the country—do not have the resources to provide timely aid to vulnerable families, the number of Yemeni children forced into such fates will continue to rise.
[1] Names changed to safeguard vulnerable Yemenis without basic human rights protections.
[2] https://reliefweb.int/report/yemen/wfp-yemen-food-security-update-january-2024
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7U4zbz24HQ
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4HtNvdH07Q
[5] A shrub cultivated in the Middle East and Africa that contains the alkaloid cathinone, a stimulant, which is said to cause excitement, loss of appetite, and euphoria.
[6] https://soas.lau.edu.lb/news/2022/03/childhood-and-displacement-in-yemens-protracted-crisis.php
[7] https://www.ilo.org/global/standards/subjects-covered-by-international-labour-standards/child-labour/lang–en/index.htm
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