Affiliations: Bureau of Statistics, International Labour Organization, 4 rue des Morillons, CH-1211 Geneva 22, Switzerland. Tel.: +41 22 799 6313; Fax: +41 22 799 6957; E-mail: ashagrie@ilo.org
Abstract: ‘Child labour’ has always existed in one form or another. Some forms are exploitative and/or hazardous because they affect the health, spiritual, moral and social development of the children. Many of them are performed under conditions which violate the provisions of international conventions. Yet, the actual magnitude, nature, determinants, consequences and distributions of child labour have never been fully quantified. In recent years it is believed that the practice not only has become increasingly widespread but also more harmful due to several factors, including the economic crises in many countries and a growing pressure from trade globalisation. This development has led to serious concerns as well as to controversy about child labour issues in individual countries and internationally. Consequently, the ILO launched in 1992 the International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) whose main objectives included the quantification of all aspects of the phenomenon at country, regional and global levels. Its exhaustive investigation in more than 200 countries confirmed that the dearth of statistical data was due to the absence of appropriate methodologies for collecting the relevant information. Consequently, special survey approaches were designed and field-tested in several countries. Since then, the newly developed methodologies have been used in a growing number of countries for producing the required statistics at the national level. The results have enabled the ILO not only to make estimates on the extent of economically active children, but also to describe some of the nature, causes, consequences, and distributions of their activities (see Tables 2–4). Since some of the non-economic activities, particularly those which are illegal or immoral in nature, have particularly detrimental effects to the children engaged in them, intensive investigations into their prevalence are now underway in many countries worldwide (Table 1).
