Despite laws, child labour is a growing problem

The World Day Against Child Labour was marked on June 12. A staggering 215 million children are trapped in working conditions that flout every clause of the child labour law of International Labour Organisation (ILO). Around the world, children of varying ages are being put to work across a range of sectors and in pathetic, even dangerous, working conditions that deprive them of their basic rights to childhood.

According to reports, Africa and Asia, together, account for the majority of child labour statistics in the world, followed by Latin America, with a very small percentage of child labourers in Europe and the US. While most countries in the world are signatories to the ILO’s child labour law, it’s their individual interpretations and amendments that reduces the overarching impact and effectiveness of the ILO, as well as the UN’s Conventions of the Rights of the Child (ratified by 193 countries) to a formality.

Compounding this unfortunate situation is the lack of economic development in many countries which actively encourages them to sustain an informal economy by treating children as part of the workforce, abetted by traditional values in certain societies, in Africa and Asia for example, which consider children as an additional source of income. In the face of countries doing little to stem this rot in their system, the argument that child labour diminishes the ability of a country to reach excellence, skews its economic growth model and stymies the development of its most important human resources asset ends up as mere rhetoric.