World still had 138m child labourers in 2024

AFP | United Nations

Email : editor@newsofbahrain.com

Nearly 138 million children were still working in the world's fields and factories in 2024, the United Nations said yesterday, 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, the world's countries set themselves the ambitious target of putting an end to child labor by 2025.

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

Last year 137.6 million children ages 5-17 were working, or approximately 7.8% 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 never the less 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.

"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% 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% 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 percent of all children in that age group.

And yet the societal elements that reduce child labor are wellknown, 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.

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