Violates a nation’s minimum age laws

Threatens children’s physical, mental, or emotional well-being

Involves intolerable abuse, such as child slavery, child trafficking, debt bondage, forced labour, or illicit activities

Prevents children from going to school

Uses children to undermine labour standards

168 million children worldwide are child labourers, accounting for almost 11 per cent of the child population as a whole

Children in hazardous work that directly endangers their health, safety and moral development make up almost half of all child labourers, numbering 85 million in absolute terms

The number of child labourers decreased by 47 million, from 215 to 168 million, and the number of children in hazardous work declined by 30 million, from 115 million to 85 million between 2000 – 2012

The largest absolute number of child labourers is found in the Asia and the Pacific region

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region with the highest incidence of child labour, even though there has been a decline there

Child labourers (5 – 17 years old) number almost 77.7 million in Asia and the Pacific

There are 59.0 million child labourers in Sub-Saharan Africa

12.5 million in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

9.2 million in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

In the Sub-Saharan Africa region, more than one in five children (21 per cent) in the 5-17 years age group are child labourers

This compares with 9 per cent in Asia and the Pacific and LAC and 8 per cent in MENA

Child labour involvement is much higher among boys than girls for the 5-17 years age group as a whole

99.8 million boys 68.2 million girls

These figures might underestimate girls’ involvement in child labour because they do not reflect involvement in household chores, particularly hazardous chores, which are not included in the global estimates

Children in the 5-11 years age group account for by far the largest share of all child labourers: 73 million, or 44 per cent of the total child labour population

They are the most vulnerable to workplace abuses and compromised education

Agriculture is by far the biggest sector, accounting for 59 per cent of all those in child labour and over 98 million children in absolute terms

A total of 54 million are found in the services sector (of which 11.5 million are in domestic work); this sector has increased 6 per cent since 2008

12 million are found in industry

PakistanA young girl carries a load of wool down a street in a poor

section of Peshawar. Pakistan has laws that limit child labor, but the laws are often ignored. An estimated 11 million children

work in Pakistan's factories.

NOTE: This photo essay is from TIME for Kids magazine, April 1, 2005.

KenyaA young boy picks coffee beans at the Misarara Estate Coffee Plantation. The boy works with plants laden with pesticides.

About four million Kenyan children are forced to work in hard, often dangerous jobs.

BangladeshOn the outskirts of Dhaka, children heat and mix rubber in a

barrel at a balloon factory. Thousands of kids in Bangladesh are forced to work to help earn money for their struggling families.

NepalA boy works in a tea stall in a small village in Nepal's Rukum District. Nepal is one of the world's poorest countries, forcing huge numbers of children to do hard labor. For a majority of

children in Nepal, education is a luxury.

MexicoA girl threads tobacco strings in the tobacco fields of Nayarit,

Mexico. Many children working in the fields end up dropping out of school. In the surrounding communities of Nayarit, 86 percent

of children do not go to school.

Ivory Coast, AfricaA boy in Tortiya looks for diamond stones in a sifter. Many

children laboring in Africa work for more than 12 hours without breaks. They are often separated from their families.

ParaguayDaniel, 11, shines shoes for 33 cents in Asuncion. One of every

four children under 14 works in the streets of Paraguay, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

AfghanistanSakina, 9, and Javed, 6, work on a carpet loom at a small

workshop in Kabul. Afghanistan's deep poverty forces many children to work in adult jobs.

IraqA young boy stacks bricks in the Iraqi town of Nahawan. There

are more than 100 brick factories in Nahawan, located about 37 miles south of the capital city of Baghdad. Though kids work in

the factories, there are no hospitals or schools nearby.

CambodiaA girl rummages through piles of garbage at a dump in Phnom

Penh. She is looking for things to recycle in order to earn money for her poor family.

RwandaCharles, 10, picks up leaves on a tea plantation in Byumba. In addition to being forced to work, children in Rwanda are also

used as soldiers.

MyanmarA young Burmese boy climbs on top of piles of teak wood in a government-run lumberyard in Pyin Ma Bin. The boy's job is to label the teak wood. The wood is common in Myanmar and is in

high demand in Japan and most of Asia.

ChinaA young Chinese boy sells newspapers to passing drivers and cyclists in the streets of Beijing. Millions of Chinese children work because their parents can not afford to send them to

school.

TexasMariella, 10, cuts onions in a field in Eagle Pass. As many as

500,000 kids in the United States work on farms for little pay to help their families earn money. Many are forced to miss months

of school at a time so they can work.

Globalization and the global economy

Free TradeDebt and Interest Payments by poor

countries to rich countriesWeak labour laws and lack of worker

unions

Child labour follows a cycle

Free education for all childrenUniversal labour standardsUnion and community organizingCampaigns to generate public

awarenessPublic protests and letter writing

campaigns to politicians

Look for “Fair Trade” certified logos or Rugmark “no child labour” logos on the products that you buy