During the Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour that took place in Durban, South Africa on 16-20 May 2022, over 8,000 delegates from various countries adopted the Durban Call to Action to deal with the scourge of child labor.
The document’s signatories pointed out the need for urgent action now that “the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts, and humanitarian and environmental crises, threaten to reverse years of progress against child labor”.
The move is of particular importance given that at the beginning of 2020, 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million boys – were involved in child labor globally, accounting for almost 1 in 10 of all children worldwide. The figures reported by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF are in stark contrast to the UN Sustainable Goal 8.7 which provides for abolishing all forms of child labor by 2025.
Addressing the participants at the conference, ILO Director-General Guy Ryder said:
“We are in the right place, at the right time. The right place because Africa is the continent from where the solutions to the global child labor challenge will emerge. The political commitment, policy innovations, and coordinated regional action in the face of challenges perhaps steeper than in any other region, are evidence of that. Africa is an incubator for approaches to tackling child labor that the rest of the world can benefit from.”
He noted that child labor has actually increased for the first time since “we started measuring it 20 years ago”. Today, there are 160 million children involved in child labour with half of them doing work that puts their health, safety, and moral development at risk. 89 million are very young – 5 to 11 years old – and child labor is particularly rising in this age group. COVID-19 has made the situation even more difficult.
“Some may say that child labor is an inevitable consequence of poverty, and we have to accept that. But that is wrong. We can never resign ourselves to child labor. We do not have to. Tackling the root causes such as household poverty is essential. But make no mistake, child labor is a violation of a basic human right, and our goal must be that every child, everywhere is free from it. We cannot rest until that happens,” Ryder said.
The ILO-organized Durban conference on the elimination of child labor was the first ever held in Africa. It was also the first to be attended by child delegates who urged officials to speed up progress in this direction. It builds on the four previous conferences in Buenos Aires (2017), Brasilia (2013), The Hague (2010, and Oslo (1997).
