Blog 1

the start of my journey!

I have a high interest in learning about the correlation between politics, culture, and the economy. These different interests led me to think about a research topic in which I could incorporate at least two of them; thus giving birth to my topic.

I was born and raised in El Salvador, a Latin American country. Unlike millions of kids in the country, I was fortunate to have a family with a stable job that could provide for me, but this was not the case for many children.

When I was little, I used to go to the city center with my grandma from time to time. There were street vendors everywhere shouting for people to buy their products. And every now and then I used to see a kid doing the same. In my mind, these kids had normal lives just like I did; they went to school, did their homework, and prepared to go to university, but never did I stop to think that it was maybe all they did in order to provide for their family and survive.

Courtesy of Global Citizen

Sometimes I sat with my family to watch the evening news and used to see news about human rights activists providing people from poor neighborhoods with relief. This always made me happy because I thought that little by little people would be able to get out of poverty, but it wasn't until I grew up that I understood the scale of the problem and how much was happening outside of the television.

Before this research journey, I had a basic understanding of how the lack of education in communities leads to a lack of access to higher-paying jobs. But as I researched this topic, I found out the cycle of poverty that is created by families without a college degree. Their lack of education prevents them from providing the resources and pushing their children to pursue a higher education that could finally get them out of extreme poverty.

I felt like I had won the lottery as I kept researching

I had finally found something that interested me after many failed attempts at other topics.

Goal:

I plan to find the impact that child laborers have on the Latin American economy and how they contribute to it. On the social aspect, I will be looking at how child labor laws have been implemented to eradicate child labor and how much progress has been done for the past 5 years before the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Then on the economic lens, I will look at the health of the economy by looking at Gross Domestic Product and the wages made by job sectors where child labor is most prominent and compare the two. By studying both, I will attempt to identify whether eliminating child labor would hurt or help the economy after being impacted by the pandemic.

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