“I made it.”

‘Tell them I made it.’ That is the title of an advertisement in a recent issue of The Economist magazine placed by GoodWeave International, which works on eliminating child labour around the world.

The ad profiles Hem Bahadur Moktan, who at age 10 was a child worker himself in a carpet factory in Lalitpur 26 years ago, when Nepal’s woolen carpet exports were booming and weavers preferred the cheap and nimble fingers of children to work the looms.

Today, Moktan is the face of Nepal GoodWeave Foundation, the organisation that rescued him when he was 13. As a Child Development Officer he now helps children like himself in workplaces, providing them a chance to better their lives.  

“As a boy, I did not know there was a life beyond the four walls of that weaving room in Bungmati,” remembers Moktan, now 36. But there was a thread of hope as he worked the loom all day in that dark and dank room.  

Moktan was the second child in a family of subsistence farmers in Kharling village that clings precariously to a mountain slope in Makwanpur district.  When a landslide took away their home, the family migrated down to Chitwan.

A labour broker who was also from Moktan's village paid an advance to Moktan’s father, and the young boy came to Kathmandu. He was made to work 16 hours a day, and older co-workers bullied him, calling him फुच्चे माइला. 

“Although I came to Kathmandu to earn money for my family, deep down my real aim was to search for a better opportunity,” recalls Moktan. “And that, I ultimately got.”

In the 1990s many children from districts surrounding Kathmandu were moving to Kathmandu’s carpet factories. The industry was booming, employing 300,000 workers, and since child labour laws were lax, many were children. Carpet dyes polluted the rivers. 

Handwoven carpets made up nearly 70% of Nepal's total exports, and even the rugs at the White House were said to be from Nepal.  

But the industry soon went into decline with cheaper machine made Chinese carpets, recession in the West, as well as undercutting by rival Nepali exporters. 

Despite the struggle, Moktan is not bitter about his past: “If I hadn’t come to Kathmandu then, I may be toiling away today as a migrant worker in the Gulf.” 

After three years of hard labour, one day in 2000 he was rescued by the GoodWeave Foundation which had already rescued 5,000 other Nepali children from carpet factories.

At 13, Moktan was taken to the organisation’s transit home in Kathmandu where he spent the rest of his childhood studying. He later completed a Bachelors in law and prepared for the civil service exam.

All through this, he supported the education of his younger siblings, and Moktan is proud that his family is the most educated in the whole neighbourhood. 

He applied for a vacancy for a Child Development Officer at Nepal GoodWeave Foundation, and he got the job because of his academic qualifications as well as his personal history of being a child worker himself. 

“I am now giving back to the organisation that gave me a future, and helping other children like me,” says Moktan, who is now Program Manager at Goodweave.  

Many rescued children joined another carpet factory, or even ended up on the streets. Moktan is among a handful who escaped that fate out of sheer determination. 

Carpets are still the country’s third biggest export item, making up 7.32% of total earnings. Today, child labour in the carpet industry is not on the scale that it was in the 1990s, although there are still children working in other sectors. 

Says Moktan: “I understand the push factors driving children to work, and I want to inspire child labour survivors by my own example to show that there is a life outside the factory.”