Childhood is not a luxury — it is a right. Yet hundreds of millions of children wake up every day not to classrooms but to fields, factories, and dangerous worksites. Child labor doesn’t just steal childhoods; it locks the next generation into the same poverty their parents couldn’t escape.

Did You Know?

• 160 million children worldwide are engaged in child labor — nearly 1 in 10 children on earth — with the highest numbers concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for more than half of all child laborers globally. Progress made over the previous two decades has stalled, and numbers are rising for the first time in 20 years. (ILO / UNICEF, Child Labour: Global Estimates 2020)
• Nearly half of all child laborers — approximately 79 million children — are engaged in hazardous work that directly endangers their health, safety, and development. This includes mining, agricultural work involving pesticides, construction, and armed conflict — conditions no child should ever face. (ILO, 2020)
• Child labor and poverty are locked in a self-reinforcing cycle. Families in extreme poverty often depend on children’s earnings to survive, pulling children out of school and into work — which in turn limits children’s future earning potential and traps the next generation in the same poverty. Breaking this cycle requires addressing both simultaneously. (ILO / World Bank)
• Children in child labor are overwhelmingly denied an education. Approximately 72 million child laborers are entirely out of school, and millions more combine work and school under conditions that make meaningful learning nearly impossible — foreclosing the very pathway most likely to lead them out of poverty. (ILO / UNICEF, 2020)