The global movement to end child labour faces significant headwinds. Many of the key actors are navigating a more contested world where funding is tighter, norms are politicized, global tensions are rising and institutions are under strain.
The ECLT Foundation’s 2026 Top 8 list goes beneath the surface of escalating global volatility to identify the fault lines that matter most for child labour and children’s rights. While some themes will be familiar, the list brings a more nuanced lens, illuminating the complex intersections of child rights, business practice and policy, and the strategic opportunities for companies and practitioners to exploit in 2026.
The VI Global Conference as a moment of consolidation
The VI Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, taking place in Marrakesh, Morocco from 11-13 February 2026, comes at a critical moment for the global fight against child labour. With the 2025 SDG target on child labour already missed, regulatory pressure mounting, funding streams shrinking and key due diligence rules facing dilution, the stakes could not be higher.
The timing is significant: nearly two-thirds of all child labour cases are now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, with most occurring among children under 12 who perform unpaid family labour on subsistence and smallholder farms. Against these challenges, expectations across regions and stakeholder groups are converging on the need to move beyond 'business-as-usual' outcome documents and toward credible, time-bound implementation and collaboration pathways.
Addressing the fundamental challenge of early entry into child labour on smallholder and subsistence farms will require the conference to place particular emphasis on social dialogue, living incomes, informality, and cross-sector collaboration as central pillars for ending child labour in agriculture.
Growing reliance on private-sector and due diligence funding
At a time of shrinking development assistance and budget cuts to UN agencies, the private sector will become more important for sustaining progress towards SDG 8.7.
In response to heightened investor and regulatory expectations, responsible companies, particularly multinational enterprises, are increasing their investments in supply chain due diligence and targeted measures to address child labour risks. They are also aligning procurement, compliance and finance functions with human rights performance, including child labour due diligence, which will channel more private funding into monitoring and remediation.
While there is no denying that private sector due diligence funding has helped drive progress against child labour and its potential to do more is considerable, a word of caution is needed. For social partners, multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) and civil society organizations (CSOs) tapping into this funding, the challenge in 2026 and beyond is to shift the private sector partners toward a more balanced human rights-based approach: one that combines compliance‑driven, supply‑chain action with cross‑sector collaboration and tackles root causes alongside immediate needs.
Pressure to demonstrate impact
Sustainability reports that read more like marketing materials are increasingly being criticized. Public expectations are shifting toward performance-focused reporting that offers an honest assessment of how companies are addressing persistent challenges across their supply chains. As companies face this public scrutiny, they will increasingly pass expectations for demonstrable impact onto NGOs and MSIs, often without extending funding cycles or accounting for outcomes beyond the supply chain.
Yet, NGOs and MSIs know that behaviour change takes time. Institutional change and structural transformation take time, sometimes decades. Donor pressures, however, compress all this complexity into a single, reductive demand: impact. This trend creates perverse incentives: over-emphasis on easily countable outputs (trainings delivered, classrooms built etc.), under-investment in systemic drivers (living incomes, social dialogue, public institutions etc.) and fragmentation rather than cross-sectoral collaboration.
Careful expectation management with public and funding partners will be important to ensure sustained support for interventions that address systemic change over the long term, rather than short-term, easily visible metrics.
Fiscal tightening and reduced UN funding risk reversing gains against child labour
At the 2025 UN Business & Human Rights Forum, OHCHR Director Volker Türk underscored that human rights remain critically underfunded amid rising anti-rights movements, economic nationalism, and geopolitical fragmentation. This warning gained urgency on January 7, 2026, when the United States announced its withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including 31 UN entities.
Reduced funding for UN agencies such as the ILO will constrain their ability to provide technical assistance, support labour and human rights, convene tripartite dialogue, and serve as neutral standard-setters. Without renewed country commitments to social and economic arms of the UN, the global child labour movement risks fragmentation as coordination functions shift toward bilateral initiatives, NGOs, and private actors that lack the ILO’s convening authority and global mandate.
More importantly, fiscal tightening by states threatens funding for education, social protection, and livelihoods. These trends risk driving vulnerable households back into child labour as safety nets weaken.
Pushback against ESG reshapes the due diligence agenda
Political backlash against ESG and sustainability discourse is reshaping how mandatory human rights due diligence is framed. Companies that once looked to international standards and regulation for clarity increasingly find a multilateral system constrained by growing geopolitical division, underfunding and economic nationalism. At the same time, anti-ESG actors are becoming more coordinated, exposing companies to regulatory whiplash and heightened legal uncertainty.
For responsible companies, the tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights will continue to be critical north stars, as more companies recognize the link between responsible business conduct and stable operating environments. In this context, child labour will continue to be framed as the material business risk that it is, not as a voluntary CSR concern.
Fragmentation undermines integrated area-based approaches
Experience shows that addressing child labour requires adopting an integrated area-based approach that tackles the issue by addressing its root causes across an entire geographic area, rather than focusing narrowly on individual children, households, or single supply chains.
Despite growing evidence on what works, child labour funding and interventions remain fragmented across international agencies, NGOs, bilateral donors, and philanthropy, with limited pooled financing mechanisms or cross-sector collaboration. This fragmentation contributes to the displacement of child labour from one sector to other, often more hazardous, sectors and activities, while also driving duplication of efforts and inefficient use of limited resources.
Overcoming fragmentation will likely remain a priority for the child labour movement in 2026, requiring a shift beyond narrow supply-chain approaches toward integrated, area-based and systems approaches that operate at scale and foster cross-sector collaboration that advances the best interests of children.
Diverging regulatory landscapes deepen global asymmetries
While some countries and regions are strengthening due diligence, including making them mandatory, others resist or weakening them, citing sovereignty or competitiveness concerns. This creates uneven expectations across global supply chains.
Due to strains on the multilateral system which affect the pace and political prioritization of treaty negotiations, adoption of a final treaty in 2026 will be unlikely, given political divergence and the complexity of reconciling states’ positions. Against this background, more sessions of the Open-Ended Intergovernmental Working Group (OEIGWG) and diplomatic consultations are expected through 2026, with incremental refinements to the draft treaty text.
In the absence of a global treaty, greater reliance on market-access rules, trade measures, import controls and buyer requirements are expected to drive positive change beyond national borders, including on child labour issues.
Strategic litigation and liability involving child labour gain prominence
Strategic litigation in business and human rights continues to evolve as a tool for accountability. For example, International Rights Advocates recently brought cases against Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and Tesla, following claims by former child miners alleging corporate complicity in child labour linked to cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Regardless of whether such cases ultimately succeed or fail in court, strategic litigation can be expected to continue to play an important role in exposing legal gaps, subjecting corporate practices to public scrutiny, and generating evidence that can inform advocacy, regulation, and policy reform.
As such, companies and investors must pay attention to child labour as a source of legal and financial risk, not just reputational risk. Grievance mechanisms will be more important in anticipating and managing such risks.
The eight pressure points outlined above reveal a system under stress, one where funding is tightening, institutions are weakening, and the political will to act is fragmenting. Yet they also reveal where action matters most and opportunities lie. For responsible businesses, this is a call to move beyond compliance-driven supply-chain fixes toward genuine cross-sector collaboration. For governments, it is a mandate to invest in the foundational conditions—education, social protection, rural livelihoods—that prevent child labour in the first place. For civil society and multistakeholder initiatives, it is a moment to defend the normative architecture and long-term vision that short-term funding cycles threaten to erode.
The children of sub-Saharan Africa, and the millions of smallholder households caught in cycles of poverty and child labour across the world, cannot afford another conference that fails to translate words into action. 2026 must be different.
