Funding cuts could harm progress on child labour as world misses key target

By Olivia Le Poidevin

GENEVA (Reuters) -The world has missed its target of eliminating child labour by 2025 and funding cuts threaten recent progress on reducing the numbers of children in work, a new joint report by two United Nations agencies said on Wednesday.

The number of children in work worldwide has almost halved in the past 25 years but nearly 138 million were still involved in child labour in the past year, denied the right to learn and play, the International Labour Organization and UNICEF said.

UNICEF's executive director Catherine Russell said funding cuts by donor countries threaten to undermine what she said had been encouraging signs on the issue in the last four years.

Reductions in education and livelihood support programmes risk forcing more vulnerable families to send their children to work, she said.

"Progress towards ending child labour is possible by applying legal safeguards, expanded social protection, investment in free, quality education... We must recommit to ensuring that children are in classrooms and playgrounds, not at work," Russell said in a statement.

U.N. agencies have expressed alarm about the impact of drastic cuts implemented by the Trump administration in U.S. foreign aid, though the ILO-UNICEF report did not explicitly reference this issue.

Though there are 22 million fewer children in work since 2020, some 54 million worldwide remain in hazardous work that could harm their health and development, the agencies said.

The majority of children work in agriculture, while about a quarter are in services such as domestic work or selling goods in markets.

Two-thirds of all child labour takes place in sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for around 87 million children, with only a small reduction from 23.9% to 21.5% over the last four years.

"The findings of our report offer hope and show that progress is possible. Children belong in school, not in work... We still have a long way to go before we achieve our goal of eliminating child labour," said ILO Director-General Gilbert F. Houngbo in a statement.

(Reporting by Olivia Le PoidevinEditing by Gareth Jones)