UNITED NATIONS, Jun 13 : Around the world, some 160 million children work to earn a living, instead of going to school \u2014 that\u2019s almost one in every 10 children, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), a Geneva-based UN agency.<\/p>\n
Marking World Day against Child Labour, ILO\u2019s Director-General Gilbert Houngbo said that for the first time in 20 years, child labour was on the rise.<\/p>\n
\u201cChild labour rarely happens because parents are bad, or do not care. Rather, it springs from a lack of social justice,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Houngbo stressed on Twitter that the \u201cmost effective solutions\u201d to the child labour emergency are decent work for adults, so that they can provide for their families, and improved social protection.<\/p>\n
He also underscored that tackling the root causes of child labour requires ending forced labour, creating safe and healthy workplaces, letting workers organize and make their voices heard, as well as ending discrimination, since child labour often affects the most marginalized.<\/p>\n
More than half of all those subjected to child labour \u2013 some 86.6 million \u2013 are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to joint research by the ILO and the UN Children\u2019s Fund (UNICEF).<\/p>\n
Almost 24 per cent of all children in the region, or close to one in four, are in child labour.<\/p>\n
Most of those in child labour on the African continent, and indeed worldwide, work in agriculture. The UN\u2019s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Monday that agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of child labour globally and that the numbers of youngsters working in the sector are on the rise.<\/p>\n
FAO stressed that child labour was three times more prevalent among rural smallholders in farming, fisheries or forestry than in urban areas.<\/p>\n
The agency emphasized that children often assist their parents in producing crops, rearing livestock or catching fish, \u201cmainly for family consumption\u201d, and that while not all this work is considered child labour, \u201cfor too many children, their work, particularly in agriculture, goes beyond the limits of safety and well-being and crosses into a form of labour that can harm their health or educational opportunities\u201d.<\/p>\n
FAO underscored the need to tackle the issue \u201cfrom the field right up to the global level, to ensure that children have a childhood\u201d.<\/p>\n
The agency said it was working with partners on eliminating child labour in key sectors such as cocoa, cotton and coffee. Together with ILO and the European Union, FAO has reached more than 10,000 women, men, youth and children in Burkina Faso, Mali and Pakistan as part of a project aiming to address child labour in cotton value chains by improving households\u2019 livelihoods, empowering women economically, and raising awareness of the problem.<\/p>\n
FAO said it has also developed a framework on ending child labour in agriculture, aiming to provide guidance to policymakers, and has supported countries such as Uganda and Cabo Verde in developing prevention policies.<\/p>\n
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UNITED NATIONS, Jun 13 : Around the world, some 160 million children work to earn a living, instead of going to school \u2014 that\u2019s almost one in every 10 children, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), a Geneva-based UN agency. Marking World Day against Child Labour, ILO\u2019s Director-General Gilbert Houngbo said that for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":337365,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-337362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n