Child Labor and Barriers to Schooling

The International Labour Organization (ILO), together with UNICEF, publishes the principal global estimates of child labor through its joint report series "Child Labour: Global Estimates," most recently updated in 2021 using 2020 data. That report estimated 160 million children aged 5 to 17 were in child labor worldwide at the start of 2020 — roughly one in ten children globally — of whom about 79 million were in "hazardous work," defined as work likely to harm a child's health, safety, or moral development. The 2021 report marked a troubling reversal: it was the first time in the two decades since the ILO began systematic global estimation, starting from a baseline around 246 million child laborers in 2000, that the total number of children in child labor had risen rather than fallen from the previous estimation round, an increase the ILO and UNICEF attributed jointly to rising poverty, conflict, and the disruption of school systems associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.