‘One in 10 children work to earn a living’

City Desk :
Around 160 million children or almost one in every 10 children worldwide do not attend school and instead work to support their families.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) revealed these shocking figures on Monday in observance of World Day Against Child Labor as a reminder of the critical need to put a stop to this practice.
ILO’s Director-General Gilbert Houngbo said that for the first time in 20 years, child labour is on the rise.

“Child labour rarely happens because parents are bad, or do not care. Rather, it springs from a lack of social justice,” he said, reports UNB.
Houngbo stressed on Twitter that the “most effective solutions” to the child labour emergency are decent work for adults, so that they can provide for their families, and improved social protection.
He also emphasized that in order to address the main causes of child labor, it is necessary to end forced labor, establish safe and healthy workplaces, for employees to organize and have their views heard, and eliminate discrimination because child labor frequently affects the most vulnerable groups.

More than half of all children who are forced to child labor-roughly 86.6 million people-live in sub-Saharan Africa, according to research conducted jointly by the ILO and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Almost 24 per cent of all children in the region, or close to one in four, are in child labour.
Most of those in child labour on the African continent, and indeed worldwide, work in agriculture. The UN’s 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.