In light of the current pandemic and the official launch of the 2021 UN International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour on 21 January, the following public statement comes from a large number of prominent professors and researchers, supported by many experienced practitioners of development NGOs and agencies and working children themselves. At the heart of the statement lies an urgent call for more realistic and evidence-based approaches to child labour to be developed in dialogue with the research community and working children and their families.

It has become painfully clear that the COVID-19 pandemic does not affect all equally. Children are particularly vulnerable to the physical, psychological, social, and economic effects the pandemic has caused. Apart from disruption to education and lack of internet access, severe mental health problems can arise from extended isolation while growing up. Furthermore, UNICEF has warned us that COVID-19 has compounded food crises resulting from conflicts, disasters, and climate change to turn a nutritional crisis into an imminent catastrophe threatening millions of children in the immediate future.

Post-COVID recovery is unlikely to return children to pre-COVID conditions: disrupted and increasingly unequal economies, climate change, and growing land and water shortages are likely to make children’s lives increasingly precarious. Many families have been forced to include their children in efforts to obtain the necessities for life, which can result in extensive and even dangerous work, sometimes making schooling impossible. There is thus an urgent need to provide long-term supporting interventions to improve the lives and chances of these children.

As mentioned, 2021 has been declared the International Year for the Elimination of Child labour in direct support of Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which stipulates that child labour in all its forms is to be eliminated by 2025. Following the ILO’s own global estimates on child labour, even in a pre-COVID world this objective was entirely unrealistic. Currently, there is a great danger that working children’s precarious situations can be further damaged by well-intentioned, but ineffective and potentially counterproductive pre-COVID-19 norms and practices that are primarily based on ideological and emotional convictions instead of scientific evidence and working children’s own experiences.

The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been a learning experience for many people, demanding a reconsideration of some of the values that lie behind the way we live. We have learned to appreciate the value of poorly-paid front-line workers in a variety of services, even if this is still not reflected economically. We have seen young people taking up responsibility to help those who are vulnerable and needy, knowing that it is inadequate to rely on formal institutions for support. People have established food banks and soup kitchens for those whose food security is shattered. Small, local, informal classes have sprung up for children deprived of schooling and without resources for online classes. In short, as people have been driven apart physically, the values of social connectedness and responsibility have come to the fore. Old ways of living no longer work and are unlikely to work in the future, even when the pandemic has come to an end, as new challenges brought about by climate change and other factors will continue to make the conditions for many of the world’s children even more difficult.

In the light of this growing appreciation for cooperative inter-responsibility, it is now time to consider long-term strategies to eliminate harmful child labour in ways that effectively improve the lives of the children concerned. Removing them from work is no help if this drives them deeper into the famine and broken lives that the work was undertaken to mitigate.

To be helpful, interventions must be adapted to situations that vary not only locally, but also according to the specific status and circumstance of the children concerned – boys, girls, disabled children, children in minority groups, and children of different socio-economic statuses all have different needs and different vulnerabilities. Intervention should consider well-being holistically: it must attend to the overall well-being and development of the children – physical, mental, social and spiritual – as stipulated by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; articles 17, 23, 27, 32). Subsequently, children’s work and the developed interventions must be assessed according to the actual effects – both beneficial and damaging – on the children’s well-being.

In many societies, children are educated to grow in their responsibility and contribution to their families and societies as they acquire competencies. Participation in work often contributes to this education – understanding ‘education’ to go beyond schooling, which indeed has been shown on occasion to damage such cultural learning. Even outside the COVID-19 crisis, appropriate work can have benefits for children, which should not be withdrawn from those who are in other ways disadvantaged: beneficial work should be encouraged rather than prohibited.

To ensure that interventions to end child labour achieve holistic improvement, we can no longer continue blindly with the well-intended but unrealistic goal of eliminating child labour by 2025. Instead we have to take into account what working children and their families are already doing to mitigate their hardship and improve their lives, and to consider how, both in response to the COVID crises and the precarious future, it might be possible to build on this.

We therefore call on the UN, UNICEF, and the UNCRC Committee as the primary overseers of the UNCRC along with the ILO to facilitate a more inclusive dialogue among governments, UN agencies, donors, NGOs, researchers, and working children themselves.

Signatories