Child Work and Child Labour: The Impact of Educational Policies and Programmes in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

1. Statistics

  • By 2025, the international community aims to achieve notable progress towards eliminating child labour, including its worst forms.

  • Between 2016 and 2020, global progress stalled for the first time in 20 years, reversing previous downward trends that saw child labour falling by 94 million between 2000 and 2016, from a value of 245.5 million in 2000.

    • Between 2016 and 2020, there have been increases in the number of children in child labour (8 million more children) and children in hazardous conditions (6.5 million more children).

    • Particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, where one in five children were in child labour at the beginning of 2020 (ILO and UNICEF 2021).

  • Based on global estimates, 160 million children were engaged in child labour globally at the start of 2020.

    • 63 million are girls and 97 million are boys.

    • This accounts for roughly one tenth of all children worldwide – many of whom are in hazardous conditions (79 million children, of which 28.8 million are girls and 50.2 million are boys) (ILO and UNICEF 2021).

  • The vast majority of children (more than 70 per cent) are working in agriculture (commercial and family farms), while 30 per cent work in the remaining sectors, most notably manufacturing, mining and domestic services (ILO and UNICEF 2021).

  • While most regions show declines in child labour, child labour has been increasing in sub-Saharan Africa since 2012.

  • One in every three children involved in child labour is not in school (ILO and UNICEF 2021).

    • Among children in child labour, 28 per cent of children between the ages of 5 and 11, and 35 per cent of adolescents between the ages of 12 and 14, are out of school (ILO and UNICEF 2021).

2. Main Factors

  • Early labour-force entry, economic hardship and accompanying school dropout frequently co-occur, with lifelong negative consequences for children, their families and the human capital development of communities where child labour is prevalent (Boutin and Jouvin 2022).

  • The COVID-19 crisis significantly increased the risk of child labour.

    • This risk increased mostly due to health or economic losses, which can increase the demand for child labour as a coping strategy.

    • Prolonged periods of school closures, together with more limited access to child protection services, also increased children’s vulnerability to exploitation.

  • Insufficient access to school, low school quality, discriminatory practices or equity gaps in class are critical push factors for child labour. In many contexts, school is not seen as a cost-effective and beneficial alternative to child labour.

    • In these settings, children engage in child labour as their households cannot afford the cost of education, because schools are not available locally or school quality is so low that time spent in school is not seen as beneficial by children and their households

  • Interventions: schooling and child labour outcomes are determined by a complex set of factors operating across four main levels:

    • child level – including, for example, a child’s health and nutrition status, or a child’s awareness of the importance of education and the hazards related to child labour

    • household level – such as disposable income, or caregivers’ awareness of the relevance of education and the hazards related to child labour

    • school and teacher level – including, for example, availability of schooling infrastructures, or adoption of specific teaching modalities

    • community and system level – such as national education policies and budget.

3. Main Actors

(This section requires synthesizing information from various parts of the document. The main actors are implied through the discussion of different interventions and policies.)

  • UNICEF Innocenti

  • ILO

  • Schools and Teachers

  • Communities

  • Systems (National Education Policies, Governments)

  • Children

  • Households and Families

4. Possible Solutions

  • Evidence- based policies and programmes making education more affordable, in tandem with social protection, and supply-side interventions improving the quality of schooling can produce sustainable reductions in child labour, in addition to improving schooling outcomes.

  • Therefore, ensuring accessible high-quality education remains critical to address child labour.

  • The evidence assessed in this REA suggests that educational policies and programmes at all levels (children, households and families, schools and teachers, communities and systems) can significantly contribute to reduce children’s engagement in economic activities if appropriately designed.

  • When designing educational policies and programmes it is important to identify and leverage the potential pathways through which the programme can influence child labour, beyond schooling outcomes.

  • The amount of monetary transfers matters in determining whether a programme is effective or not in reducing child labour.

  • Programmes should be gender- and age-sensitive, especially in reference to norms on time use.

  • Potential unintended programme impacts need to be considered.

  • Consider changing contexts.

5. Other Important Notes

  • ‘Child labour’ is defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.

    • It mostly includes work below the minimum age and work under hazardous conditions.

  • In low- and middle-income countries, there is growing interest in the promise of educational policies and legislative reforms along with local and regional education-related programmatic activities to fight child labor.

  • REA contributes to the literature by having a focus on educational policies and programmes, and assessing their causal links with child labour outcomes.

    • The REA only includes experimental or quasi-experimental studies that allow estimating causal effects on child labour outcomes.

    • As it pertains to policies and programmes, the REA focused on those that have a specific design element related to education and/or an education objective, even if the programme does not have an explicit objective in terms of child labour reduction.

    • Introducing this focus, this REA goes into more detail on the specific mechanisms that link educational policies and programmes to child labour outcomes.

  • The REA considers a broad range of labour outcomes including child work (i.e., children engaged in economic activities or household chores, not necessarily detrimental) and child labour, that is, detrimental forms of work, defined as work below the minimum age or work under hazardous conditions.