NEW YORK: Nearly 138 million children were still working in the world’s fields and factories in 2024, the UN said on Wednesday, warning that given the slow pace of progress, eliminating child labor could be delayed by “hundreds of years.”
Ten years ago, upon adopting the so-called Sustainable Development Goals, the world’s countries set themselves the ambitious target of putting an end to child labor by 2025.
“That timeline has now come to an end. But child labor has not,” UNICEF and the International Labor Organization said in a joint report.
Last year, according to data published every four years, 137.6 million children aged 5-17 were working, or around 7.8 percent of all children in that age group.
The figure is equivalent to twice the total population of France.

This nevertheless represents a drop since 2000, when 246 million children were forced to work, often to help their impoverished families.
After a worrying rise between 2016 and 2020, the trend has now reversed, with 20 million fewer children working in 2024 than four years prior.
“Significant progress” has been recorded in reducing the number of children forced into labor, UNICEF chief Catherine Russell said.
“Yet far too many children continue to toil in mines, factories, or fields, often doing hazardous work to survive.”
According to the report, nearly 40 percent of the 138 million child laborers were employed in 2024 doing particularly hazardous work “likely to jeopardize their health, safety, or development.”
Despite some rays of hope, “we must not be blindsided by the fact that we still have a long way to go before we achieve our goal of eliminating child labor,” ILO Director-General Gilbert Houngbo said.
At the current rate of reduction, “it will take hundreds of years,” said UNICEF expert Claudia Cappa.
Even if countries quadruple the pace of progress recorded since 2000, “we will already be in 2060,” she added.
Progress for the youngest children is particularly slow, the report found. Last year, nearly 80 million children aged five to 11 were working — about 8.2 percent of all children in that age group.
And yet the societal elements that reduce child labor are well-known, according to Cappa.
One of the main factors, free compulsory education, not only helps minors escape child labor, but also protects children from vulnerable or indecent conditions of employment when they grow up, she said.
Another, she added, is “universalizing social protection” as a way to offset or ease burdens on families and vulnerable communities.
But global funding cuts “threaten to roll back hard-earned gains,” UNICEF’s Russell said.
According to the report, agriculture is the sector making the most use of child labor (61 percent of all cases), followed by domestic work and other services (27 percent) and industry (13 percent, including mining and manufacturing).
Sub-Saharan Africa remains the hardest hit, with around 87 million child laborers.
Asia-Pacific has seen the greatest progress, with the number of working children falling from 49 million in 2000 to 28 million in 2024.