| Resumen: |
This publication is a result of the excellent collaboration between the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Labour Organization (ILO). On this occasion, the issue of child labour is addressed.
In recent years, Latin America and the Caribbean has reduced child labour thanks to the sustained action and shared efforts among governments, employers" and workers" organizations, civil society and international cooperation agencies. Between 2012 and 2016, the region showed a reduction of 17% in the rate of child labour and 35% in the rate of hazardous child labour. In other words, two million children and adolescents stopped working in our countries during this period.
Despite the good news, the countries of the region should not lower their guard because there are still 10.5 million children and adolescents between the ages of 5 and 17 who work, most of them in hazardous activities that prevent them from completing their education, put their health and safety at serious risk and limit the development of skills to insert properly in the labour market. Special attention must be paid to those who are most at risk of entering the workplace early: children and adolescents vulnerable due to economic deprivation in the houdehold, poor levels of social protection, inequality and belonging to groups particularly exposed to child labour and its worst forms, such as indigenous peoples, rural populations, the Afro- descendant population, migrants, women and girls, and those who reside in areas at risk of disasters.
Although the goal of prevention and eradication of child labour has been present, with different levels of priority, in the political agenda of most countries in the region, the adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in September 2015, gave new impetus and vigor to this struggle, by including in SDG 8 on decent work and economic growth, Target 8.7, which calls to "Take immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking and secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including recruitment and
use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labour in all its forms."
The complexity of the phenomenon, combined with an uncertain economic scenario for Latin America and the Caribbean, calls on governments, employers" and workers", civil society organizations and international agencies, not only to redouble efforts to avoid a setback, but to define more focused, coordinated and integrated strategies to deal with the persistence of child labour, especially in its worst forms. Moving towards the achievement of Target 8.7 implies not only reducing child labour, but also achieving at least 35 other targets established in the SDGs1, which have strong links and interdependencies on issues that are crucial to the development agenda of the region.
Not leaving anyone behind in achieving these Sustainable Development Goals requires looking for
imaginative ways to cooperate between countries and stakeholders, putting value on knowledge, experience and accumulated capacity. Along these lines, 28 countries in the region, with the participation of employers" and workers" organizations, created the Regional Initiative Latin America
and the Caribbean Free of Child Labour, a platform that seeks to accompany the first generation free
of child labour for the year 2025.
The Regional Initiative proposes a Policy Acceleration Framework that includes strategies that reinforce the social protection and education systems focused on the prevention and eradication of child labour, coordinating the intervention with the ministries or Secretaries of Labour. This framework is based on two areas of intervention: 1) protection to remove children and adolescents from child labour and the restoration of their rights; and 2) prevention through actions designed to identify and intervene in a timely manner to interrupt the trajectory of child labour.
The present study, which is part of the second area, seeks to provide empirical evidence that serves as a basis to establish priorities in national and subnational policies aimed at the prevention and elimination of child labour. To this end, the ILO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean and ECLAC jointly developed the Child Labour Risk Identification Model, a methodology that, based on the statistical information available in the countries (surveys, censuses and/or administrative records) allows, on the one hand, to identify the territories most vulnerable to child labour and, on the other, to estimate the weight of various factors associated in order to determine which multisectoral actions are more effective in interrupting the trajectory of child labour and, in the medium term, reduce the indicator in a sustained manner. |
