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World Day Against Child Labour Date

World Day Against Child Labour – 12 June

World Day Against Child Labour Theme 2015

NO to child labour – YES to quality education!

World Day Against Child Labour Essay & Speech

The World Day Against Child Labour is an International Labour Organization (ILO) sanctioned holiday first launched in 2002 aiming to raise awareness and activism to prevent child labour. It was spurred by ratifications of ILO Convention No. 138[1] on the minimum age for employment and ILO Convention No. 182[2] on the worst forms of child labour.

The World Day Against Child Labour, which is held every year on June 12, is intended to foster the worldwide movement against child labour in any of its forms.

World Day Against Child Labour Logo Image

The most recent global estimates suggest some 120 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are involved in child labour, with boys and girls in this age group almost equally affected.1 This persistence of child labour is rooted in poverty and lack of decent work for adults, lack of social protection, and a failure to ensure that all children are attending school through to the legal minimum age for admission to employment.

The World Day Against Child Labour this year will focus particularly on the importance of quality education as a key step in tackling child labour. It is very timely to do so, as in 2015 the international community will be reviewing reasons for the failure to reach development targets on education and will be setting new goals and strategies

World Day Against Child Labour Quotes

“Family poverty and income shocks are often catalysts of child labour. It is time to break this cycle and ensure that families living in poverty have adequate incomes, income security and health care. These social protection measures can help households weather shocks and keep their children in school and out of child labour.”

Juan Somavia, ILO Director-General

The Report presents empirical evidence of how child labour combined with limited education can lead to increased youth vulnerability and greater difficulties in transiting to good jobs. This evidence includes results from the ILO School-to-Work Transition Survey (SWTS) programme, an unprecedented data collection effort allowing the analysis of the trajectories followed by youth to enter the world of work in a total of 28 low- and middle-income countries around the world. The Report also reviews evidence of how the child labour-youth employment link can operate in the opposite direction, i.e., of how the difficulties faced by youth in the labour market can make personal investment in education less attractive as an alternative to child labour earlier in the lifecycle.

Hazardous work among adolescents aged 15 to 17 years is a third focus of the Report. Individuals in this critical age group, who are above the minimum working age in most countries but at the same time are still legally children, overlap the child labour and youth employment fields. Evidence is presented indicating that an alarming share of working adolescents aged 15 to 17 years are in hazardous work and therefore are child labourers.

Taken together, the evidence presented in the Report makes a strong case that the challenge of finding decent work during youth cannot be separated from the challenge of eliminating child labour earlier in the life cycle. Eliminating child labour, in other words, is a key policy goal in itself and a necessary starting point for achieving decent work for all.