Ending Child Labour: Why Agriculture and Younger Children Must be the Priority
See ECLT's full call to action at the VI Global conference on the Elimination of Child Labour here.
Child Labour in Agriculture and Among the Youngest Children
In June 2025, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNICEF released new global child labour estimates indicating that, despite some progress, 138 million children were still engaged in child labour by the end of 2024.
Child labour remains overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the agricultural and wider rural economy. The 2024 global estimates also reveal a troubling trend:
- Of nearly 138 million children in child labour worldwide, 79 million (57 per cent) are just 5 to 11 years old.
- Among 79 million children in child labour aged 5–11, 68 per cent are engaged in agriculture.
- In the Sub-Saharan Africa region, which accounts for nearly 63 per cent of all cases globally, nearly 7 out of 10 children in child labour are younger than 12 years.
- Teenagers and young workers are leaving agriculture: as children grow older, they move out of agriculture to work in industry and services.
- The result is that the agricultural workforce is increasingly composed of older workers and younger children.
Worryingly, progress has been slowest among children aged 5 to 11. Between 2008 and 2024, child labour in this group declined by just 13% - a reduction of 12 million - compared to decreases of 55% among those aged 12-14 and 50% among 15–17 year-olds. As a result, the share of the youngest children in child labour rose from 42% in 2008 to 57% in 2024.
This means that although overall numbers have fallen, more and more younger children are entering child labour. This trend is particularly pronounced in Sub-Saharan Africa, where rapid population growth meant that, despite a 2.4 percentage point decline in child labour between 2020 and 2024, the absolute number of children involved remained unchanged. The situation is akin to draining an overflowing bathtub without turning off the tap — the rate at which children aged 5 to 11 are entering child labour threatens to offset the gains made among older age groups.
Turning Off the Tap
Most child labour among children aged 5-11 occurs in subsistence and smallholder farming systems, where young children work informally as unpaid family labour.
These farms typically:
- Rely heavily on manual labour.
- Produce lower yields per hectare.
- Struggle to generate sufficient income to hire adult workers or invest in children’s education.
- Often rely on children’s work. Even when children are enrolled in school, attendance and homework are disrupted by demands at home.
Addressing this functional dependence of subsistence and smallholder farms on child labour, particularly among younger children, is critical to 'turning off the tap', that is, preventing the concurrent recruitment of younger children into child labour.
The 3P’s Framework for Change
To truly turn off the tap, businesses, governments, the international community, practitioners, and civil society must act on the three key pathways or levers for reducing functional dependence on child labour in subsistence and smallholder farming: Policy, Production, and Procurement.
Policy:
Government and sector policies play a critical role in preventing the functional dependence of subsistence and smallholder on child labour by addressing the structural barriers that make such dependence necessary for survival.
Government policies that expand rural education infrastructure, provide free and quality public education, reduce indirect schooling costs, and align school calendars with farming cycles can significantly ease the financial burden on parents and promote regular school attendance. In parallel, policies that promote producer organizations can strengthen farmers’ collective capacity and reduce the economic pressures that contribute to child labour. Furthermore, sectoral commitments - joint efforts by companies, industry associations, cooperatives, and public institutions within a specific sector - can play a transformative role in overcoming the functional dependence on child labour in agriculture and other high-risk sectors. By adopting a sector-wide living income benchmark and strategy, embracing shared responsibility, and enabling coordinated action, these commitments can drive systemic change.
Production:
Subsistence and smallholder farming systems are typically labour-intensive, low-input, and characterized by low productivity and unsustainable agricultural practices. These challenges are exacerbated by climate change impacts, volatile market prices, and limited access to productive resources, credit, and infrastructure.
Addressing these constraints requires coordinated investments in climate-smart and sustainable agricultural practices, access to crop finance, and modern production technologies. This is essential for subsistence and smallholder farmers to achieve high yields per hectare, build resilience and improve their livelihoods.
Procurement:
The procurement practices of local and national traders, buyers, manufacturers, intermediaries, and government crop boards significantly influence smallholders’ incomes and labour decisions, including through factors such as determination of production cost, the timing of payments, prices offered, delivery schedules, and other terms specified in procurement contracts.
Procurement practices should be anchored on negotiated fair prices with small farmers or their representative organizations, timely payments and the promotion of decent work, including the achievement of living income and wages on those farms.
Implementing the 3P’s: Coordinated and Connected Action
The 3P’s are interrelated and interdependent. Progress in any one of the three P’s will be far more effective in reducing functional dependence on child labour when it is supported by the other two. For example: higher farm productivity must be accompanied by enabling policies that ensure access to effective public extension services, and vice versa. At the same time, such policies must be reinforced by procurement practices of traders, buyers, manufacturers and crop boards that guarantee fair negotiated prices, and pay for produce delivered in a timely manner. Moreover, the different buyers of the various crops grown by the farmer must be equally committed to ensuring a decent standard of living for the grower. In the absence of coordinated action between government, business, and farmers, isolated efforts will fall short of tackling the underlying functional dependence on child labour in subsistence and smallholder farming systems.
At the national level, operationalizing the 3P’s in the agriculture means establishing inclusive coalitions—bringing together UN agencies, donors, government ministries, agricultural workers’ and growers’ associations, and civil society. Such coalitions should:
- Pilot and scale sector-wide strategies for eliminating child labour.
- Cut across subsectors connected to global, regional, domestic, and local supply chains, while also responding to the specific realities of families engaged in subsistence and smallholder farming.
- Link national efforts to global initiatives such as the International Partnership for Cooperation on Child Labour in Agriculture and the Alliance 8.7 Action Group on Agriculture, to ensure shared accountability, coherence and knowledge exchange.
These national and global actions must ultimately be reinforced by trade policies and agreements that translate into tangible benefits for children, families, and rural communities, creating an enabling environment for lasting change.
Nothing for Us, Without Us
Despite evidence that child labour is concentrated in subsistence and smallholder agriculture, the troubling reality is that the very farmers at the heart of the issue are rarely consulted, involved, or represented in policy dialogues and forums aimed at eliminating child labour. As a result, significant resources are often spent on outcomes and interventions that are poorly adapted to local contexts, and may ultimately be ignored or rejected by subsistence and smallholder farmers. This disconnect is further compounded by fragmented, short-term initiatives that reduce subsistence and smallholder farms to the narrow lens of global supply chains, overlooking the complex realities of smallholder livelihoods. In these settings, families often engage in diverse economic activities, and child labour may be seasonal, intermittent, or shift across sectors, tasks, or products—even within a single day. Such oversimplification leads to siloed, disconnected responses that risk displacing and entrenching child labour, rather than eliminating it.
It is time to break this cycle. As the international community prepares for the VI Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, we must move beyond events and forums that discuss child labour in the rural economy without the voices of rural people themselves. This moment calls for a deliberate shift toward inclusive processes that actively engage and elevate subsistence and smallholder farmers, rural workers, and their representative organizations—before, during, and after the conference—as essential agents of systemic change.
Inclusion is not only a question of justice—of “nothing about us without us”. As affirmed in international instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), inclusion is a legal and moral obligation. It is also a strategic imperative - the foundation for building child labour solutions that are effective, legitimate, and sustainable.
VI Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour: A Call to Action
As the world prepares for the VI Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour, to be held in Morocco in 2026, we call on governments, social partners, donors, and civil society to:
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Focus on agriculture and children 5-11 years who work in the sector as unpaid family labour: Reduce functional dependence of small farms on the labour of their children through an integrated and coherent rights-based policy, production and procurement framework anchored on social dialogue and promotion of decent work, including the achievement of living income and wages on those farms.
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Amplify the voices of farmers and workers: Promote social dialogue in the rural economy and meaningfully involve farmers, farm workers and their representative organizations before, during and after the conference in devising an inclusive global strategy and action plan to end child labour in agriculture.
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Support cross-sector collaboration: Build national and global coalitions that unite farmers, businesses, governments, civil society and sectors toward a shared goal: making small farms viable and free of child labour.
Final Thought
Ending child labour requires more than removing children from fields—it demands systemic change in policies, production and procurement practices. By focusing on subsistence and smallholder agriculture, and by empowering farmers to eliminate child labour on their farms, particularly among children aged 5–11 in Sub-Saharan Africa, we can begin to turn off the tap and secure a better future for millions of children worldwide.