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In 2004 there were 218 million children working illegally in the eyes of international treaties. Child labour is defined as all economic activity for children under 12 years, any work for those aged 12-14 of sufficient hours per week to undermine their health or education, and all “hazardous work” which could threaten the health of children under 18.

Almost all child labour occurs in developing countries, largely in agriculture but also including domestic service, factory production and backstreet workshops. Despite a fall of over 10% in the figure since the last assessment in 2000, over 25% of children in sub-Saharan Africa and 18% in Asia remain trapped within the cycle of poverty of which child labour is part.

126 million of these children are engaged in hazardous work, such as mining or handling chemicals, which is otherwise described as the “worst forms of child labour”. A further class within this latter description is known as the “unconditional” worst forms of child labour and refers to any form of slavery or coercion, trafficking, prostitution and military enrolment – no statistics are available for this category but the numbers are likely to be close to 10 million.

There is an additional category of “working children” not included in these statistics because the profile of age, nature of work and hours is not regarded as harmful. For example, light work of a few hours per week could be regarded as beneficial; “child labour” by contrast should be eliminated.

Supply and Demand

Poverty is the seed-bed of child labour. Poor parents send their children to work for reasons of economic expediency, the consequent denial of education setting in motion a mutually reinforcing cycle liable to pass down the generations. It is nevertheless oversimplistic to attribute the problem solely to poverty; schools are often prohibitively expensive, of poor quality or inaccessible. Cultural pressures can undermine perception of the long term value of education, especially for girl children. 

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has regenerated the supply side of the child labour equation. Households where adult members suffer prolonged periods of illness suffer dramatic cuts in income and forced sales of assets which are compensated by withdrawing children from school and sending them to work. Africa in particular has seen a dramatic rise in the new phenomenon of child-headed households, brought on by AIDS mortality. An estimated 10% of all children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Africa are heads of households, compelled to provide for siblings. There is evidence that the global fall in child labour is being reversed in African countries most affected by HIV/AIDS. 

This supply of child labour is accommodated by the demand of employers for a cheap and flexible workforce, including small-scale enterprises whose owners exploit their own family members. It is a mistake to think of globalisation as a force for improvement in labour standards. Although large-scale manufacturing industries may not directly rely on child labour, backward linkages created through subcontracting labour-intensive segments of the product may be less compliant. For example, corporations such as Monsanto and Syngenta have been accused of bidding down cotton seed prices to the point that farmers are unable to afford adult labour.

Girl children are in demand for domestic service, the invisible nature of which adds to their vulnerability to exploitation and abuse. Absence from official statistics is even more likely for those girls kept away from school in order to work for their own families in the home or on the land.

Children's Rights

child labour

In 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) within which Article 32 asserts the right that children should not be engaged in work deemed to be “hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health”. Global political initiatives to strengthen these rights, together with the production of internationally recognized statistics, are coordinated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) which has allied its mission with the cause. For example, the 1999 ILO Convention for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour calls for the immediate elimination of all “worst forms” of work for children. The ILO aims to achieve this objective by 2016 with clear plans in place by 2008.

Countries ratifying these conventions are committed to providing laws which enforce the provisions. Similar rights to children’s education backed by laws serve to reinforce child labour legislation. Every full-time student is one less full-time child worker.

Unfortunately, 20 countries have not yet ratified the ILO convention, notably India and Nepal where child labour remains stubbornly widespread – estimates suggest there are up to 25 million Indian child labourers with many more millions unaccounted for, whilst in Nepal 42% of boys aged 10-14 are working. In 2006 India strengthened legislation by extending its definition of hazardous work to include domestic labour and catering establishments but there is deep scepticism that attitudes towards children will change.

The worst form of exploitation of girls - child prostitution - is being fought in part by extra-territorial laws that permit prosecution of citizens who sexually abuse children in another country. For example nationals from many European countries and the US can now be charged at home for engaging a child prostitute in Thailand.

Universally recognised children's rights are however insufficient means of combating child labour. Although almost every country has laws prohibiting the employment of children below a certain age, the legislation may exempt certain sectors - often the very sectors where the highest numbers of working children are found. In other countries, penalties for violating child labour laws are inadequate. And probably the most common obstacle to adequate legal protection for children is the fact that legislation is not enforced.

Development Solutions to Child Labour

Empowering child labourers

Where laws fail, pressure groups step into the breach. The concentrated use of child labour in certain highly visible industries has, in some cases, attracted intense media attention and ultimately successful public campaigns for governments to get tough on child labour. Authorities in India occasionally engineer police raids on suspect factories creating headlines that children have been “rescued”. But such actions are typically ineffective in the absence of institutional capacity to rehabilitate the children and there is increasing consensus that such targeted programs need to do more than simply remove children from work.

Similar doubts exist over Western-inspired sanctions or boycotts of specific goods which do little to address the root causes of child labour. Likewise voluntary labelling of goods invariably entails difficulty in establishing necessary credibility – indeed any cultural change imposed from the outside and which impacts family income raises difficult questions.

The integration of child labour concerns into national development strategies is therefore the preferred route to a lasting solution. Reduction of chronic poverty through broad-based economic and social development, with a strong emphasis on human resource development, will create the environment for fundamental change in cultural attitudes towards children. Tanzania and Brazil are countries which have been singled out as adopting development strategies which recognize the importance of child labour.

Millennium Development Goals and Child Labour

Child Labour

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) offer no favours to child labour campaigners. The targets and indicators within the MDG framework make no reference to the subject of child labour which is therefore less likely to feature in national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers that shape governments’ policies. Critics argue that child labour could undermine progress towards Goals for education, HIV and gender equality. Compounding the faultlines, MDG indicators for primary education aim for a total of 5 years of education, far less than implied by child labour conventions.

Achievement of the MDG to provide universal education by 2015 would by definition eliminate child labour but this assumes a one-way relationship between the two issues. Whilst it is true that child labour flourishes in the vacuum of inadequate or non-existent education, it is also true that the availability of education alone will not be sufficient to break down the demand for child labour. The problems of education and child labour need to be recognized both for their interconnection and for their separation.

In an implied admonition of the MDG approach, a new international joint-agency group established in 2005, The Global Task Force in Child Labour and Education, explicitly aims to achieve education for all through the elimination of child labour. The principle is reinforced by a cost/benefit analysis carried out by the UN which demonstrates the value of eliminating child labour by reference to the long term economic benefit of a more educated workforce.

Child Soldiers

Children at war in DRC

The grotesque abuse of children for military purposes survives seemingly beyond the powers of development strategies or human rights law. Programmes for reintegration of child soldiers call for complex psychological therapies rather than mere schooling.

Children are vulnerable to this most extreme form of labour typically in countries suffering longstanding civil conflict, in regions of extreme poverty and a complete breakdown of central authority. The proliferation of lightweight but deadly small arms of sophisticated modern design – a child of 10 can be trained to strip down a Kalashnikov – enables a cheap, unquestioning and expendable army to be conscripted from children. Warlords will abduct or purchase child soldiers from their families with impunity.

The UN lists 12 countries in which an estimated total of 250,000 children are found in military service, amongst them Sri Lanka, Uganda, Nepal, and Philippines. There may be as many as 70,000 child soldiers engaged in government and rebel armies in Burma. These countries are now under pressure to sign the “Optional Protocol” to the CRC which would compel new laws and reintegration of child solders into normal life. The International Criminal Court already considers the recruitment of children under age 15 for military purposes to be a war crime.