It is the World Day Against Child Labour and there is bad news. A recent United Nations report on child labour has raised an alarm over growing child labour across the world due to the COVID19 pandemic. The report, released on June 10, warned that the progress made in ending the menace of child labour has stalled for the first time in 20 years, owing to the disastrous socio-economic consequences of the pandemic.
“The number of children in child labour has risen to 160 million worldwide – an increase of 8.4 million children in the last four years – with millions more at risk due to the impacts of COVID-19,” the report states.
Titled ‘Child Labour: Global estimates 2020, trends and the road forward’, the report is jointly published by two UN agencies — United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and International Labour Organization (ILO).
The report warns that worldwide, nine million additional children are at the risk of being pushed into child labour by the end of 2022 as a socio-economic aftermath of the pandemic.
A simulation model used by the report shows that this number could even soar to 46 million if these children don’t get access to the much needed social protection coverage.
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“The pandemic has clearly heightened the risk of child labour, above all through a sharp rise in poverty that may increase families’ reliance on child labour, and through school closures that deny families the logical alternative to sending children to work,” the report stated.
The joint report further informs that in sub-Saharan Africa, population growth, recurrent crises, extreme poverty, and inadequate social protection measures have led to an additional 16.6 million children in child labour over the past four years.
“Even in regions where there has been some headway since 2016, such as Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, COVID-19 is endangering that progress,” it noted.
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Counting on measures to mitigate the crisis, the two UN agencies said that expanded income support measures for families in situations of vulnerability, through child benefits and other means, will be critical.
“So too will back-to-school campaigns and stepped-up remedial learning to get children back in the classroom and help them make up for lost learning once there, when conditions permit.
The report underlines that even before COVID19, more than 258 million children and youth were out of school worldwide.
Child labour in numbers
The latest global estimates cited by the report shows that 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million boys – were in child labour globally at the beginning of 2020, in other words almost one in 10 of all children worldwide.
“Seventy-nine million children – nearly half of all those in child labour – were in hazardous work that directly endangers their health, safety and moral development,” the report pointed out.
‘More boys in child labour than girls. But…’
The report noted that the involvement in child labour is higher for boys than girls at all ages. Among all boys, 11.2 per cent are in child labour compared to 7.8 per cent of all girls.
“In absolute numbers, boys in child labour outnumber girls by 34 million,” it informed.
But, the report stated, when the definition of child labour expands to include household chores for 21 hours or more each week, the gender gap among boys and girls aged five to 14 is reduced by almost half.
The road forward
Circling on the policy-driven aspects of the crisis that fuel child labour, the report stated that poverty is the single biggest reason behind child labour.
“Debt relief should be extended and debt restructured in already heavily indebted countries so that social spending is not crowded out by increasing debt service payments,” it said.
“We must avoid the mistakes of the past that saw urgently needed credit flows made contingent on austerity measures that inflicted the most harm on children and families in greatest need,” the report advised.
