Living on the world's leftovers – children who work collecting rubbish they can use or sell follow a bulldozer through one of the largest refuse dumps outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Photo: UNICEF/HQ96-0035/Franck Charton
No one suggests that children under the age of eighteen should do no work at all. Even the youngest can help around the home and, as they grow older, take on some lights tasks. But “child labour” becomes a problem when children are doing work that might harm their healthy development or which prevents them from attending school.
Children have the right to be protected from work that is dangerous or might damage their health or education. But some 158 million children worldwide are involved in child labour. What is more, over half of these children are doing dangerous jobs such as mining, prostitution, or working with chemicals. In fact, around 74 million children under the age of 18 currently risk long-term damage to their health because they are involved in dangerous work.
Children are forced to work, often for very little or no wages, because of poverty and because primary education is not always freely available. With 15 million children now orphaned by HIV/AIDS, there’s a terrible risk that even more children will be forced into dangerous labour, to support themselves or their brothers and sisters. Employers are often keen to recruit children since they will work more cheaply than adults and are likely to be more submissive.
Many countries do not keep statistics about child labour, because they know it’s not supposed to exist, so they don’t want people to know it’s happening. Even those who try to keep records have a problem because much child labour is ‘invisible’. By this we mean that the work children do takes place in the home or in fields, so it is hard to find out about. Millions of girls work as domestic servants and unpaid household help and are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.
The largest numbers of working children are found in the developing world. The most serious problems are in Africa where 115 million of children aged 5-14 are working, followed by South Asia and the Pacific (23 million) and Latin America and the Caribbean (11 million). The kind of work they do varies from country to country, but most – 70 per cent – work in agriculture.
UNICEF exists to protect children from dangerous work. It works to help children at risk, and tries to persuade governments to stop the most harmful kinds of child labour. To achieve this, we work with governments to bring about new laws, we support a whole range of child protection projects, including schemes which encourage children to attend school.