In Pictures

Gallery|Human Rights

In Pictures: Struggling to end child labour

With 168 million child workers worldwide the fight to end child labour is far from over.

Jeat, 13 years old, works at a street side motocycle repair shop in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Recent statistics show that 37 percent of children in the southeast Asian country are involved in child labour.
By Al Jazeera
Published On 23 Jun 2014

There are an estimated 168 million child labourers worldwide many of whom are engaged in dangerous trades or working in hazardous environments. 

And while trends seem to be on the decline, the struggle to end the practice is far from over.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) 2013 report most child labourers are found in the agricultural sector with lesser numbers in service industries like car repair shops or restaurants. Regionally the highest number of children involved in labour are located in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. 

More than half of child labourers are employed in hazardous environments that directly endanger their health and development.

While the number of boys involved in extreme forms of labour is higher than girls, global estimates are hard to obtain due to the hidden nature of certain types of work such as prostitution, pornography, slavery and serfdom. 

A Bangladeshi child labourer carries empty bottles at a plastic bottle recycling centre in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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A Pakistani scavenger girl collects recyclable items from garbage to earn a living for her family in Islamabad. Though exact numbers are difficult to obtain in Pakistan, currently 3.3 million children are involved in child labour.
Approximately 21 percent of children in Mali are involved in labour and many of those in mining. The children often complain of back problems and difficulty breathing as a result of exposure to dust, and hard manual work.
(***)El Chino(***), adding to the 26 percent of child labourers in Bolivia, works repairing tyres in La Paz. Hundreds of Bolivian children work as farmers in the fields, perform dangerous tasks in mines or try to survive in cities.
A child gold miner poses while other children look for gold in a traditional mine in the village of Gam, where gold mining is the main business activity in the region. In 2010, the Central African Republic suffered from a staggering number of child labourers with 29 percent of children between 5 and 14 working. 
A supervisor, left, instructs 13-year-old Ramesh Sardar of Nepal, centre, as he works on a construction site for a road in Kathmandu, Nepal. Thirty-four percent of Nepali children between 5 and 14 are engaged in child labour.
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Young Palestinians repair a car in the town of Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza. Child labour is widespread in the Gaza Strip because of the high rates of poverty and unemployment, according to reports.
Two Yemeni boys work in car workshop in the capital Sanaa. Although laws in Yemen ban children from working in 72 different fields like agriculture and mechanic shops, enforcement is very ineffective. Many activists and experts have warned against the increase of child labour in Yemen, seeing the spike as a result of deteriorating economics. Many of the children never return to school.
An Egyptian child loads a cart with cement bricks in a brick factory on the outskirts of Qalyobiya, 45km north of Cairo, Egypt. The Egyptian government estimates that some 1.6 million minors work - almost 10 percent of the population aged 17 or under, often in arduous conditions. Other experts put the number at nearly twice that.
An Afghan girl works at a brick kiln on the outskirts of Herat, Afghanistan. Due to the lack of schooling and education facilities in Afghanistan and the need to earn an income for often large families, parents send their children to the factory to work. Ten percent of Afghan children under the age of 14 are engaged in some type of work. 
In Indian-administered Kashmir, a child breaks coal for furnaces. The billion dollar industry engages 100,000 labourers.