Cecilia Flores-Oebanda

Born into poverty in the Visayas, in central Philippines, Cecilia was herself a child labourer, selling fish and scavenging. In her teens she started organising young people and agricultural workers, calling for rights and democracy at the height of the Marcos dictatorship. She was involved in the insurgency movement against the regime, which led to her being imprisoned with her husband for four years. During this time she had two of her children who remained with her in the detention centre.

Once she was freed, Cecilia moved to Manila, where her work for marginalised migrant workers began. There were many displaced activists from the Visayas who came together in Manila to work for the development of that region. It also emerged from a study carried out in the early 1990s that the majority of people in poor urban communities in the capital were from the Visayas region. In 1991 Cecilia started Visayan Forum to work for the rights of these migrant workers, especially hidden and vulnerable groups such as child domestic workers and trafficked women and children. The organisation now has six regional offices and seven project areas at strategic locations around the highways and ports of the Philippines.

Visayan Forum began with community-based programmes aimed at tackling the root causes of child labour and trafficking. They raise awareness among poor urban communities and run micro-credit and savings schemes.

Visayan Forum's domestic workers programme provides crisis services to child domestics and exploited adult domestic workers, such as a telephone hotline, medical and legal assistance, and shelters. Through SUMAPI, an association of domestic workers that Visayan Forum founded in 1995, domestic workers are involved in helping each other. SUMAPI's volunteers are both current and former domestics. They go to the areas where domestics of all ages meet, such as schools, churches and parks, and inform them about their rights, how they can get assistance and keep track of how they are doing. Currently there are around 8,000 members; half are in Manila with the rest in the provinces.

Cecilia recognises the clear links between domestic work and human trafficking. Many domestic workers migrate from rural areas to the cities and are vulnerable to traffickers. As well as trafficking children and women into domestic work, traffickers deceive women and girls into believing they will be employed as domestic workers, and then force them into sexual exploitation. Visayan Forum has developed partnerships with agencies such as the ports authority and the coastguard, to intercept boats carrying potential trafficking victims from the outlying islands to Manila or overseas to countries such as Japan or one of the Gulf States. Visayan Forum then gives them temporary shelter in their halfway houses and supports them in pursuing criminal cases and, where appropriate, in being returned home.

Cecilia and Visayan Forum are at the forefront of lobbying efforts for domestic workers' rights, such as their campaign for the Domestic Workers' Bill, which would provide basic rights for all domestic workers, as well as putting in place services and programmes dedicated to their protection. Support is growing for this Bill, which Cecilia hopes may pass into law in the coming months.

Child domestic work in the Philippines