By Yasmine Sherif
NEW YORK, Jun 12 2023 (IPS-Partners)

Worldwide, 160 million children are engaged in child labour. Without access to safe, quality educational opportunities, their dreams of a better future have been cut short. As we commemorate the World Day Against Child Labour, we must continue to support their protection from child abuse and violations – and the right to 12 years of quality education – for every girl and boy on the planet.

Besides peace, education is the best investment we can make to end illegal and cruel child labour practices. This is our investment in their young lives as much as an investment in inclusive growth and human development. This is our investment in innocent children who suffer already from painful losses due to shocks such as natural disasters, forced displacement and armed conflict. Education is one of our most important investments in justice, peace and security.

For girls and boys caught in emergencies and protracted crises, holistic education that encompasses school feeding programmes, conditional cash transfers, vocational training, mental health services, protection, social and emotional learning and academic learning is every child’s right and we cannot leave them behind to succumb to wars, climate disasters and abject poverty, forcing them into child labour.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo – where 26 million people, a quarter of the population, are food-insecure – Education Cannot Wait’s Multi-Year Resilience Programme, delivered by UNICEF, WFP and other local partners, is supporting school feeding programmes. This means girls like Noela can have at least one nutritious meal a day at school. It also means that her family has an incentive to keep Noela in school.

In Nigeria, vocational training is providing girls and boys with the life skills they need to thrive once they graduate. It also means children have access to safe and protective learning environments that insulate them from human rights violations, including recruitment into armed groups, child marriage and other assaults on their humanity.

In countries like Ethiopia and in many crisis-impacted countries worldwide, ECW supports conditional cash transfers along with a variety of other holistic educational supports. These innovative programmes provide families with cash incentives to enrol children in school and to break cycles of hunger, poverty and child labour.

Altogether, these programmes form a key thread in the social safety net that protects children from being forced into child labour to feed their families. Across the globe, more than 222 million crisis-impacted children and adolescents urgently need our support to access quality education.

By providing them with quality learning environments, by building healthy bodies and healthy minds, by transforming their extraordinary resilience into a powerful source of change through a quality education, we have a chance to end child labour once and for all in the 21st century.

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Excerpt:

ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif Statement on World Day Against Child Labour