Child labour rises worldwide for first time in decades: UN

The world has marked the first rise in child labour in two decades and the coronavirus crisis threatens to push millions more youngsters towards the same fate, the United Nations said on Thursday.

In a joint report, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN children’s agency Unicef said the number in child labour stood at 160 million at the start of 2020 - an increase of 8.4 million in four years.

The rise began before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and marks a dramatic reversal of a downward trend that had seen child labour numbers shrink by 94 million between year 2000 and 2016, it said. Just as the Covid-19 crisis was beginning to pick up steam, nearly one in 10 children globally were stuck in child labour, with sub-saharan Africa the worst affected.

While the percentage of children in child labour remained the same as in 2016, population growth meant that the numbers rose significantly.

They warned that unless urgent action is taken to help ballooning numbers of families plunging into poverty, nearly 50 million more kids could be forced into child labour over the next two years.

“We are losing ground in the fight to end child labour,” Unicef chief Henrietta Fore told reporters, stressing that “the Covid-19 crisis is making a bad situation even worse”.