- Data Points
The Numbers Behind Child Labor
Measuring the impact of working children around the world.
Not all work that children do is exploitive. But child labor is generally defined as work that children are too young to do or that harms their health, slows their development, or keeps them from school.
In the past decade child labor has declined by nearly a third, thanks in part to global awareness. More child laborers are in agriculture than in any other sector. Most work on their families’ farms, so it’s not always clear where to draw the line, says the International Labour Organization’s Yoshie Noguchi.
Still, she warns, keeping kids in jobs instead of school could yield “an uneducated generation that can’t help its country develop.”
Case study: Children and Cocoa in Ghana and Ivory Coast
Ghana and the Ivory Coast are low-wage countries, with an average daily income below a half dollar. There, many cocoa farmers earn so little they can’t afford to pay adult workers. Instead, they rely on poorly paid or unpaid children, some of whom are brought in by traffickers from neighboring countries.
But from the price we pay for a chocolate bar, not much ends up in the hands of those harvesting cocoa.
Sources for graphics: International Labour Organization; FAO; Oxford Business Group; Interinational Labour Right Forums; William Bertrand and Elke De Buhr, Tulane University; AFair Trade Advocacy Office
