By Simone Galimberti*
KATHMANDU, Nepal | 24 June 2025 (IDN) — The year 2025 should have been one celebrating the end of child labour. This was the plan as per the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with Target 8.7 tackling the most nefarious of children’s exploitation.
Unfortunately, we are still a long way away from achieving it.
According to the latest global report by UNICEF and ILO, officially the Child Labour Global Estimate 2024, Trends and the Road Forward, there have been some progress.
Compared to four years ago when there were 160 million working children, now the number is down to 138 million. The missing Target 8.7 should have made the headlines of the major news outlets, but it did not happen.
There are too many unfolding crises of geopolitical nature around the world and the plague of child labour is easily outshone and dismissed.
The massacre of the civilian population, including thousands and thousands of children in Gaza, has not only tarnished the international community. It has also highlighted the weakness and fragility of an international system unable to address this unending tragedy.
Thinking about it, fighting child labour should be a byproduct of effective and inclusive decision making. After all, what should the so much talked about concept of “good governance” be about?
While its premises are clear, what could be done when political systems in far too many nations are unable to deliver on upholding the rights of the vulnerable children?
UNICEF’s Prospects for Children Global Outlook 2025, produced by its Global Office of Research and Foresight, widely known as UNICEF Innocenti, focuses on the importance of effective national systems.
Governments in the Global South where child labour is still widespread, should prioritize the rights of children, especially those from the most vulnerable backgrounds.
The formula to do so is well known.
Education systems should be strengthened but instead they are struggling to deliver. “Data from 34 countries show that children in child labour are over 30 per cent less likely to demonstrate basic reading and numeracy skills compared to peers of the same age who are not engaged in child labour”, the Children Global Outlook 2025 explains.
Running a quality focused education system costs a huge amount of money, money that developing nations cannot afford. The same Global Outlook reminds us of this startling truth.
“At the same time, it is important to note that a global learning crisis weighs on learning outcomes in most countries with data, regardless of whether or not children are involved in child labour”.
Social protection is another fundamental area of public policies. It is effective to reduce level of poverty and therefore has a direct positive impact on reducing child labour but it also has huge financial costs.
Education, social protection is what the Child Labour Global Estimates 2024 defines as “basic policy imperatives to end child labour”. But where are the resources to implement these imperatives?
Many developing nations are in a spiraling debt cycle and their economies are not yielding the 7% of economic growth that is needed to drastically reduce poverty.
The developed nations, notwithstanding their longstanding policy of providing financial support to the Global South, are re-trenching themselves amid the multiple overlapping geopolitical crises.
Developing aid is not going to be a priority and we should even start to become skeptical about rich nations’ willingness and capacity to fulfill their obligations under the Paris Agreement. Climate finance flows from the North to the South might truly become a mirage.
So, it is really going to be paramount for developing nations to take ownership and make their systems more results-oriented. It might sound like it is becoming a cliché but the abstract concept of “whole of the government” efforts matter.
Developing nations must take the lead and assume ownership not only in the fight against child labour but in their quest of creating inclusive economies with public services able to cater to the special needs of vulnerable groups.
The Child Labour: Global estimates 2024, trends and the road forward could not be more explicit.
“Targeted policies to end child labour must go hand in hand with broader development strategies. And to be fully effective, child labour concerns must be systematically mainstreamed into economic and social policy planning – from macroeconomic frameworks to labour market reforms and sectoral strategies”.
The Alliance 8.7, a global coalition involving multiple stakeholders, including governments, that as the name itself can indicate, is committed to fight child labour, emphasizes the role of the National Action Plans on child labour.
Yet I have a lot of reservations about such plans. It is not that they are not useful. Potentially they can become catalysts for actions and developing nations manage, often with the support of external development partners, to draft and approve many of these plans.
The problem is that they are designed through a silos approach, and they are not linked to other complementary tools. They often lack ownership of the same governments that are supposed to deliver them.
Apart from developing nations’ own commitment on reducing and eliminating child labour, the issue of finance resources to fight poverty remains.
Seriously fighting corruption could free huge amounts of resources and truly open up pathways for a different and better governance system that can deliver for the vulnerable groups.
Yet in many developing nations, the whole political class is marred in corruption, and it is not uncommon to adopt tokenistic approaches for the sake of showing some action.
How to enable nations in the South to propel a clean, corruption free policy environment remains to be seen.
It is a real conundrum.
Developing aid often perpetrates and strengthens systems that are not effective in their delivery of public goods. Perhaps the upcoming decrease of international aid might provide a silver line, forcing governments in the South to clean up their act.
Still developed nations bear a lot of responsibilities. A renewed focus on human rights due diligence and implementing effective Environmental Social and Governance (ESGs) standards could make a real difference.
Unfortunately, the European Union’s will to take bold action on this front is now under assault. While only one year ago Europe was seen as a trailblazer in this area with some groundbreaking legislations like the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), here is now an ongoing backlashedagainst the same policies.
The European People’s Party, with its majority in the EU Parliament, is now pushing for slowing down or even removing these measures despite the fact that, it had voted, albeit reluctantly, for them in the previous legislature.
At least for now the EU Forced Labour Regulation remains intact and still in force. But, amid this scenario, what will the future hold in terms of effective coordination to fight child labour?
Next year Morocco will host the 6th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labor and preparations are already under ways. Unfortunately, the odds are that, once again, this event won’t bring tangible results.
Perhaps it is high time that the international community started rethinking the effectiveness of these types of narrowly focused thematic conferences.
It is not that we do not need international forums to talk about child labour but perhaps we need to have courage to end practices that do not bear any impact.
Perhaps it is high time for an inclusive and effective good governance focused conclave where child labour is discussed along other issues like education, health, gender equality, livelihoods generation and public finance management and anti-corruption efforts.
As the global aid architecture is under scrutiny and going to undertake profound changes, then, perhaps we should truly give a try and do away with silos type conferences.
What about barnstorming about a new type of UN sponsored events that could tackle child labour and a myriad of other interrelated issues while doing away with ineffective policy initiatives?
The time might have come for a new bold initiative and I have a name for it: the Good Governance against Poverty Global Summit.
*Simone Galimberti writes about the SDGs, youth-centered policy-making and a stronger and better United Nations. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: Child labour in Nigeria. CC BY-SA 4.0
