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Abstract
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Projected and real increases in children's work and labour during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic1 between 2020 and 2022 point to a harsh reality in many parts of the world-child labour still remains a major coping strategy for families when faced with schooling disruption, health and economic shocks and livelihood insecurity arising from broader social inequalities. The disproportionately large size of the informal sector in many developing economies results in both low wages for adults and the precarity of jobs, with workers unable to access social security. Alongside insufficient and low-quality early childhood, elementary and secondary education, this often places children at the forefront of family survival strategies, hindering both their development and perpetuating intergenerational poverty.
Eliminating child labour is central, therefore, to advancing children's rights as articulated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), where Article 32 recognises the child's right to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development. The CRC also calls on member states to set a minimum age for admission to work, according to the relevant provisions of international instruments. These normative standards are further reinforced through ILO (International Labour Organization) Conventions 138 (on minimum wage) and 182 (on worst forms of child labour), and the Sustainable Development Goals' target 8.7 which calls on countries to 'take immediate and effective measures' to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour.
Despite some positive trends in reducing child labour globally,2 stalling prevalence rates since the period 2016-2020 point to the challenges that the current state of 'polycrisis'--the multiple, simultaneous and often intersecting crises of climate change, conflict, and economic and food insecurity--will pose for children and their families. Global estimates in 2020 suggest 160 million children are engaged in child labour (ie, hazardous forms of work), and this is before the effects of the pandemic were felt on children's lives. Currently, sub-Saharan Africa faces the greatest challenge in terms of increasing numbers of children in child labour, including in the younger age groups of 5-11.2 However, as noted in global estimates published by ILO and UNICEF in 2021, national income is not the only predictor of child labour prevalence; more than half of all child labour occurs in middle-income countries. Inclusive and redistributive economic growth also plays an important role in the elimination of child labour...
Keywords: Human trafficking;
Language: en |