How NGOs and governments can address the growing child labor crisis

While 2021 was dubbed the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, the number of children in labor —160 million at 2020 — rose for the first time in two decades, according to estimates by the International Labour Organization and UNICEF. However, with the latest data gathered before the COVID-19 pandemic sent many families into poverty, its compounding effect on child labor is still to be seen, although 9 million additional children are at risk of being pushed into child labor by the end of the year. That number could rise to 46 million if children lack access to critical social protection coverage, according to ILO simulation models. It’s been more than two years since the pandemic affected everything from health systems to economies to classrooms, yet many of the repercussions are only now coming to the fore. The economic downturn coupled with school closures — lasting for as long as 73 weeks in Bangladesh and 83 weeks in Uganda — has created a breeding ground for child labor, experts say. With families suffering economically and children out of school, many families have been forced to send their children to work as a coping mechanism — and many won’t be going back to school. In Uganda, the National Planning Authority estimates that 30% of students will not return due to a combination of teen pregnancies, early marriages, and child labor. Conflict and displacement is also a contributing factor. Lebanon hosts 660,000 school-age Syrian refugee children, but 200,000 of them have never been to school and an estimated 180,000 have been forced into child labor. The life of a child laborer in Lebanon Adel — whose real name is withheld for privacy and child protection — was already working when COVID-19 hit. Speaking to Devex through a translator on a WhatsApp call, his mother Rola said her son has been working since he was 11 years old to help support the family. He is now 14. Arriving as refugees in Lebanon from Syria in 2013, the family depends on Adel’s income to pay for rent, food, and medicine. The father is unable to work due to medical issues, and while Rola earns some money cleaning houses, it’s not enough — especially as food prices in the country have skyrocketed by 628% in just two years. The family’s income has suffered during the pandemic, and they are still feeling its economic impact, Rola said. Adel has had different jobs over the years — including collecting scrap metal from the streets — but now works in a marble factory, he said over the phone. His working hours are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and he earns 150,000 Lebanese pounds (around $100) a week. Adel is the youngest of all the factory workers and the only one who’s underaged — most are above 18 and married with children, he said. The tasks in the factory are hazardous and involve carrying heavy weight and operating dangerous machinery, leaving him exhausted and with back pains. “You can get a child to school and give them catch-up classes, but if you don't address the reason behind why that child wasn’t in school, then you can't get the children to stay in school.” --— Purva Gupta, director, Global March Against Child Labour While Adel had to drop out in third grade, he misses going to school, seeing his friends, and carrying his backpack, he said. Given how expensive living in Lebanon has become, the family is hoping to “go to another, better country soon” so that her children are able to get an education, said Rola. ILO estimates that more than a quarter of children aged 5 to 11 and over a third of children aged 12 to 14 who are in child labor are out of school. In addition, the pandemic means “​​children are likely to be working in more informal conditions and more precarious conditions with lesser pay,” Purva Gupta, director at the Global March Against Child Labour, a worldwide network of trade unions, teachers’ associations and civil society organizations working to eliminate child labor, told Devex. Each family is different The first step is to identify these children, but the solutions to getting them out of child labor really depend on a case-by-case basis, said Gupta. “It's easy for me to say that all children must go back to school, but practically, we know that's challenging.” Addressing the root causes and vulnerabilities is a complex task. “You can get a child to school and give them catch-up classes, but if you don't address the reason behind why that child wasn’t in school, then you can't get the children to stay in school,” she said. There are different strategies, depending on each child’s circumstances, according to Abul Monsur Muhammad Moniruzzaman, program director at SOHAY, a Bangladeshi nongovernmental organization working on child labor elimination. For children with parents who are not living below the poverty line but who might not be aware of the importance of schooling, “it’s easy to quickly and easily target these children and send them [back] to the school,” he said. But for children whose families rely on their income to put food on the table, “it’s really hard to withdraw these children because if they withdraw, the money will not come home and the family will be in a difficult financial crisis,” said Moniruzzaman. Need for more social workers and social protection Social workers working on the front lines of social protection are one of the best bets for addressing child labor. “We have been pushing for a more robust, strengthened social service workforce here in Bangladesh — they've got just over 3000 social workers … but we probably need around 120,000 to do the level of casework and family work needed to protect the 45 million plus children currently impacted by various forms of child protection issues, not just child labor,” Natalie McCauley, chief of child protection at UNICEF Bangladesh said. A social worker — costing about $4,000 per year — is one of the best investments, she said. In addition, child labor and child marriage can undermine the investments in other sectors such as education and health, and can even erode the productivity capacity of future generations, McCauley said. A lack of political will and funding Governments are ultimately responsible for preventing and addressing child labor. International frameworks and national laws on child labor do exist, “but at the end of the day, there is a lack of political will towards the implementation of these laws…both at the national level and to a certain extent at the global level,” Gupta from the Global March Against Child Labour said, adding that a lot of investments have been shifted from education to just managing the pandemic. When interacting with members and meeting local government officials, many tell us they have a ministry of labor with a child labor unit, but that it’s understaffed and lacking the necessary funds, she said. On the global level, many Western governments are only interested in funding projects connected to addressing child labor in the global supply chain, she said. To address the issue faster, projects and donor funding have to go beyond global supply chains, “because most of the child labor is actually in the domestic supply chains for domestic consumption,” Gupta added. The international community is now hoping to galvinize the efforts and funding needed to accelerate progress on eliminating child labor during the Fifth Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, taking place in South Africa from May 15 to 20.