A total of 152 million children are in child labour globally

Introduction

Some things are just wrong. Child labour is a brake on sustainable development and anathema to just societies, and its eradication must be pursued with utmost determination. The eradication of child labour is a matter of human rights, with an institutional umbrella provided by two fundamental International Labour Organization (ILO) Conventions, the Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138) and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999 (No. 182), as well as by the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child. These Conventions emphasize that freedom from child labour is a human right and that the elimination of child labour is a universal and fundamental value.

The 2016 Global Estimates present the scale, prevalence, and key characteristics of child labour in the world today. Child labour remains endemic and its elimination requires both economic and social reform as well as the active cooperation of all those active cooperation of governments, workers’ and employers’ organizations, enterprises, international organizations, and civil society at large.

In response to persistent and emerging development challenges, the global community adopted the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This “2030 Agenda” is a comprehensive, far-reaching, and people-centred set of 17 interrelated goals and 169 associated targets to guide global development efforts over the coming 13 years. The Sustainable Development Goals include a renewed global commitment to ending child labour. Specifically, target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals calls on the global community 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, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms."

The current report, the fifth edition of the ILO’s quadrennial report series on global estimates of child labour, charts how far we have come and how far we still have to go to honour this commitment to ending child labour. The report describes the scale and key characteristics of child labour in the world today, as well as changes in the global child labour situation over time. It also discusses key policy priorities in the campaign to reach the 2025 target. The report, and the global estimation exercise that underpins it, forms part of a broader inter-agency effort under Alliance 8.7 (see next section) to measure and monitor progress towards target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals.

As for those produced for 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, the 2016 estimates are based on the extrapolation of data from national household surveys. The new estimates use data from a total of 105 surveys covering more than 70 per cent of the world population of children aged 5 to 17 years. All world regions are covered, and data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and China are included for the first time. The ILO gratefully acknowledges the contributions of numerous national statistical offices, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) programme of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat) in facilitating access to the data used to produce the global estimates. The US Department of Labor provided important financial support to the ILO’s statistical work on child labour.

Thanks to more and richer data from national household surveys and ongoing refinements in estimation methods, the child labour profile emerging from the 2016 estimates is the most detailed to date. In addition to expanded geographical coverage, these latest estimates break new ground in providing the first global estimates of children’s involvement in household chores and of the relationship between child labour and schooling. The methodology and data used in producing the global estimates are summarized in Annex 1 of this report and are discussed in greater detail in the companion technical paper: Methodology of the global estimates of child labour, 2012-2016.

A mixed picture emerges from the latest global estimates. Child labour has continued to fall but the pace of decline has slowed considerably in the past four years. A simple projection based on the pace of past progress suggests we are moving much too slowly to end child labour by the 2025 target date. Progress has slowed most notably for younger children and girls in child labour, groups that are especially vulnerable. Progress has also failed to extend equally across regions; Africa in particular has fallen further behind. The bottom line is that we remain far from the world we want: 152 million children are still engaged in child labour, almost half them in its worst forms.

It is hoped that the findings presented in the report, besides alerting all actors to the extent of child labour in the world today, will also help inform efforts towards ensuring that the obligations to our children enshrined in international and national law are met, and that children are fully able to realise and exercise their rights.