Despite progress, world still had 138m child labourers in 2024: UN

UNITED NATIONS: Nearly 138 million child labourers were still working in the world’s fields and factories in 2024, the United Nations said Wednesday, warning that given the slow pace of progress, eliminating child labour could be delayed by “hundreds of years.”

Ten years ago, upon adopting the so-called Sustainable Development Goals, world’s countries set themselves the ambitious target of putting an end to child labour by 2025.

“That timeline has now come to an end. But child labour has not,” UNICEF and the International Labour Organization (ILO) said in a joint report.

SINGNIFICANT PROGRESS

Last year 137.6 million children ages 5-17 were working, or approximately 7.8 per cent of all children in that age group, according to data published every four years. The figure is equivalent to twice the total population of France.

This nevertheless represents a drop since 2000, when 246 million children were forced to work, often to help their impoverished families.

After a worrying rise between 2016 and 2020, the trend has now reversed, with 20 million fewer children working in 2024 than four years prior.

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“Significant progress” has been recorded in reducing the number of children forced into labor, UNICEF chief Catherine Russell said.

“Yet far too many children continue to toil in mines, factories or fields, often doing hazardous work to survive.”

According to the report, nearly 40 percent of the 138 million child laborers were employed in 2024 doing particularly hazardous work “likely to jeopardize their health, safety, or development.”

Despite some rays of hope, “we must not be blindsided by the fact that we still have a long way to go before we achieve our goal of eliminating child labor,” ILO Director-General Gilbert Houngbo said.

‘8.2 PER CENT OF CHILDREN’

At the current rate of reduction, “it will take hundreds of years,” UNICEF expert Claudia Cappa told AFP.

Even if countries quadruple the pace of progress recorded since 2000, “we will be already in 2060,” she added.

Progress for the youngest children is particularly slow, the report found. Last year nearly 80 million kids ages five to 11 were working – about 8.2 per cent of all children in that age group.

And yet the societal elements that reduce child labour are well-known, according to Cappa.

One of the main factors, free compulsory education, not only helps minors escape child labour, “it protects children from vulnerable or indecent conditions of employment when they grow up,” she said.

Another, she added, is “universalizing social protection” as a way to offset or ease burdens on families and vulnerable communities.

But global funding cuts “threaten to roll back hard-earned gains,” UNICEF’s Russell said.

According to the report, agriculture is the sector making the most use of child labor (61 percent of all cases), followed by domestic work and other services (27 percent) and industry (13 percent, including mining and manufacturing).

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the hardest hit, with around 87 million child labourers. Asia-Pacific has seen the greatest progress, with the number of working children falling from 49 million in 2000 to 28 million in 2024.