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

UNITED NATIONS, United States: Nearly 138 million children were still working in the world´s fields and factories in 2024, the United Nations said on 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, 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 labor 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 percent 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.

“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.”