CHILD LABOUR: GLOBAL AND REGIONALOVERVIEW

Child labour remains unacceptably common in the world today.

At the start of 2020, prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19

pandemic, 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million

boys – were in child labour, or 1 in 10 children worldwide.

Seventy-nine million children – nearly half of all those in child

labour – were in hazardous work directly endangering their

health, safety and moral development.

This global estimate masks large variations across regions. Child

labour prevalence stands at 24 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa,

three times that of Northern Africa and Western Asia, the region

with the second highest prevalence. In absolute terms, the nearly

87 million children in child labour in sub-Saharan Africa are more

than in the rest of the world combined.

Recent history provides cause for concern. In the last four years,

for the first time since 2000, the world did not make progress

in reducing child labour. The absolute number of children in

child labour increased by over 8 million to 160 million while

the proportion of children in child labour remained unchanged.

Children in hazardous work mirrored these patterns: The share

remained almost unchanged but the number rose by 6.5 million

to 79 million.

The pace of progress has varied dramatically across regions. The

proportion and number of children in child labour have declined

consistently since 20083 in Asia and the Pacific and Latin America

and the Caribbean. Similar progress has proved elusive in sub-

Saharan Africa, where child labour has actually gone up since

2012, a trend especially pronounced over the last four years

when the region accounted for much of the global increase.

At present, the world is not on track to eliminate child labour

by 2025. In order to meet this target, global progress would

need to be almost 18 times faster than the rate observed over

the past two decades. According to pre-COVID-19 projections

based on the pace of change from 2008 to 2016, close to 140

million children will be in child labour in 2025 without accelerated

action. The COVID-19 crisis is making these scenarios even more

worrisome, with many more children at risk of being pushed into

child labour. Published in the UN International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour by the ILO and UNICEF, the new report Child Labour: Global estimates 2020, trends and the road forward