This June 12 marks the World Day Against Child Labour. A date on which international authorities state that the current scenario could be the most worrying in the last 20 years. According to figures from the International Labor Organization (ILO), approximately 160 million children are victims of child labor, that is, one in 10 minors.
The Director General of the ILO, Gilbert F. Houngbo, issued a call to action on the occasion of the World Day Against Child Labour, in which he stressed that the causes of this phenomenon do not come from bad parenting, but from the material conditions of low-income families. Some that force minors to have to work to survive.
“Child labor rarely happens because the parents are mean or don’t care. No, instead it stems from a lack of social justice,” Houngbo said. In addition, she stressed that the solution to mitigate child labor is the creation of “decent work for adults so that they can support their families and send their children to school, and not to work.”
Similarly, the ILO warned that if members of the international community do not take serious measures to alleviate the occurrence of child labour, especially in low- and middle-income countries, the number would rise visibly by the end of 2023.
“In recent years, conflicts, crises and the Covid-19 pandemic have plunged more families into poverty and forced millions more children to resort to child labour,” the ILO said in a statement to commemorate the date.
Latin America, an alarming panorama aggravated by the pandemic
According to statistics shared by the ILO in a joint effort with UNICEF, It is estimated that there are 8.2 million children between the ages of five and 17 working in Latin America, and 5.5 million of them perform high-risk jobs. It is the third region in the world with the most children working, below Africa and Asia Pacific.
“The pandemic has greatly affected families. In 2021 there was a significant increase in boys and girls who went to work,” said Nelly Claux, director of the impact quality area of ’Save the Children’ Peru, for the EFE news agency. .
Peru and Mexico These are the Latin American countries where this problem abounds the most. In the Andean country, the legislation allows minors to work from the age of 14, however, Claux points out that it is very “frequent to find minors working in illegal mining or girls who from an early age do domestic work in third-party homes, where many sometimes they are exploited”.
In the Mexican case, the 2022 National Child Labor Survey yielded that approximately 3.3 million boys and girls between the ages of five and 17 are workingof which 31.6% work in agricultural activities, 24.5% in mining and construction, and 14% in the sale of services and commerce.
Despite the fact that the Mexican Federal Labor Law prohibits those under 15 years of age from working, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL) placed the Aztec country as the nation with the second highest prevalence of child labor, only below Peru.
Africa, first in child labor
This Monday, the United Nations issued a statement in relation to child labor, where the situation is broken down by geographical region: Africa tops the list with 72 million children workingone fifth of the total percentage of children who are victims of child labor in the world.
An ILO report published in 2016 indicated what of the minors working on the continent, 31.5 million were doing “high risk” jobs. In other words, they performed agricultural work and those related to the mining industry, where children experience inhumane working conditions and, many times, are not paid.
The African region is also among those most affected by situations of fragility and crisis of the State, which, in turn, increase the risk of child labor, indicates the Global Estimates on Child Labor report published by the ILO.
European Union: “A sustainable and equitable future cannot be achieved without eradicating child labour”
In a thematic communiqué for the World Day against Child Labour, the European Commission and the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, stated that child labor is one of the pending tasks facing the international community, and that there is a duty to address it as soon as possible.
“The fight against child labor requires a comprehensive and effective approach to address the root causes of this phenomenon,” Borrell stressed in the joint statement with the European body. The text points to poverty and lack of access to education as the main causes.
In addition, the representatives of the European community stressed that it is necessary to create the conditions for “quality education, medical care and a dignified life” for children, and that, without the above, “a sustainable future cannot be achieved and equitable.”
The fight against child labor is at the center of the agenda for the European Union and the United Nations. However, there is a long way to go for low- and middle-income States to have the capacities to create ideal conditions to combat the phenomenon and for high-income countries to have the willingness to cooperate to solve the problem.
With EFE and local media
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