An alarming 152 million children are estimated to be part of the labour force across the globe. Nearly 50 percent of these children are engaged in work that is considered hazardous and especially harmful to their physical and mental wellbeing. Ranging from working in the agricultural, textile, glass-making, carpet and construction industries, children worldwide are also labouring as factory workers, miners, street vendors and sex workers.

Age and category of work are two important determinants in assessing child labour risks. Generally, any worker under the age of 18 is considered a child labourer, although not all forms of work that children engage in constitute child labour. There is a clear distinction between the types of labour and toil that may hinder children’s physical, psychological, social, and/or educational development and work that will not affect their physical and mental health or their academic and social life. Any kind of work that will be detrimental to a child’s growth and development into a healthy, literate and productive member of the society is classified as child labour. In addition to this, worker exploitation — described as the condition of being underpaid and overworked — is another feature of child labour. Children are often subjected to gruelling work routines and remain poorly compensated.

Both developed and developing countries around the world are plagued by child labour and the human rights violations associated with it. Poverty, economic hardship and income insecurity caused by sudden job loss or the death of a primary wage earner are some of the reasons that may compel children to prematurely join the workforce. Financial difficulties and poverty are seen as the main reason behind the pervasiveness of child labour, which causes many children to drop out of school to toil in fields and factories and remain uneducated. This deprivation of education, due to being forced into manual labour at a young age, creates a vicious cycle, wherein these children grow into adults who are mostly illiterate and unable to increase their social mobility or alleviate their poverty. They then have children who are forced to go through the process that their parents went through.

Children coming from impoverished families and those belonging to migrant or refugee families are more susceptible to falling into the trap of exploitative work and dangerous labour at a young age. With migrant and refugee children, the threat of being trafficked and thrust into child labour is greater because they may be migrating alone, living in extreme poverty or lack state protection. The plight of trafficked children is heightened by the fact that not only are they deprived of their right to education, stolen from their families and/or countries, and made to labour, but they are often pushed into illegal activities such as prostitution, drug trafficking and combat in unlawful armed groups.

Lack of comprehensive data and the absence of reliable global estimates makes the problem of child labour more difficult to combat.

Data recently collected and compiled by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) portrays a dismal reality with regards to the prevalence of child labour across the globe. The statistics show that children as young as five years old are engaged in work in some parts of the world and that boys and girls of all ages are equal victims to the various forms of child labour. A little more than one in four children are working, in different industries, in some of the world’s poorest countries. The percentages of children, between the ages of five and 17 years that are employed as manual labour in West and Central Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern and Southern Africa, and Middle East and North Africa were found to be 31 percent, 29 percent, 27 percent, and 5 percent, respectively. The UNICEF was unable to collect sufficient data to calculate regional estimates of the prevalence of child labour in the East Asia and Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia regions, as well as for Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, South Asia and Western Europe; which may suggest that child labour is quite widespread in these regions or being carried out very strategically to avoid legal repercussions. The exact extent to which children across the world are suffering from abuse and exploitation as workers in the economy remains unknown. This lack of comprehensive data and the absence of reliable global estimates makes the problem of child labour even more difficult to combat.

Even so, it is apparent that child labour is extremely widespread and will continue to increase in correspondence with the growing populations and escalating poverty rates in the world.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO), which has 187 member countries, is responsible for documenting the prevalence of child labour in the world and devising strategies to combat it. In a bid to limit the practice of child labour, the ILO has formulated the Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. In 1973, the Minimum Age Convention was drafted, according to which the minimum age for entry into the workforce was set at 15 years and that for employment in hazardous work environments at 18 years. This convention aimed to regulate the practice of children labour, by ensuring that very young children would not be employed and that they would be allowed to pursue their education until they had reached a relatively mature age. However, this convention allows for the minimum age of employment to be lowered to 13 years in case of light work and for exceptions to be made in the case of hazardous work industries, whereby certain strict conditions would permit the legal working age to be reduced to 16 years.

The Worst Forms of Labour Convention was ratified in 1999. It called for the abolition of the most exploitative and harmful types of work that employed children. These included slavery, prostitution, production/trafficking of drugs, recruitment for armed conflicts and the extraction of work under debt bondage, serfdoms and hazardous conditions. With this convention, the ILO’s objective was to fight against child labour by addressing and eliminating the most extreme forms and are a danger to the health, safety and morals of children. However, with an estimated 73 million children alone employed in hazardous work — a sub-category of the worst forms of child labour — it is exceedingly difficult for a significantly positive change to occur soon.

With the ILO and national governments constantly having to confront ever-increasing numbers of child labourers, weak enforcement of labour laws, and the non-implementation of international labour conventions, it seems highly unlikely that Target 8.7 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that calls for the abolition of child labour in its entirety, by the year 2025, will be achieved. Experts have predicted that by 2025, approximately 121 million children will be working as labourers, out of which 52 million children will be enduring hazardous work. The forecast does not provide much hope for alleviating the plight of underpaid, overworked, abused and sick child labourers, rehabilitating them, and integrating them back into society.

The writer is a graduate of LUMS and can be reached on Instagram at @sanateewrites_