Statistics on working children and hazardous child labour in brief.doc

Statistics on Working Children and
Hazardous Child Labour in Brief
Kebebew Ashagrie
Bureau of Statistics
International Labour Office
Geneva, Revised April 1998
Statistics on Working Children and
Hazardous Child Labour in Brief In this document the terms “working child” and “child labour” have been interpreted to mean “economically active child”, “child workforce” or “child labour force” and all these terms have been used interchangeably. Similarly, the broad terms “labour force” and “economically active population” are used to mean the same thing. However, according to the revised international standard of concepts and definitions as adopted by the 13th ICLS in 1982, the former term refers to the “currently active population” as measured in relation to a very brief period such as one day or one week, whereas the latter term relates to the “usually active population” as measured in respect of a long reference period, such as 12 months.
I. WORKING CHILDREN
1. Introduction
It mon knowledge that data on child labour are extremely scarce. The reason for this is the absence of an appropriate survey methodology for probing into the work of children which, for the most part, is a "hidden" phenomenon. Consequently, the ILO designed special sample survey methodologies and experimented them in four countries. These were further refined and adopted for investigating at the national level the child labour situation in a number of countries.

The child labour problem being multi-dimensional, the information sought through the specialised survey approaches involved answers to the following questions, among others:
- Who are the working children and how many are there in the individual countries?
- How old are they when they start to work for the first time and how do they live?
- Why do they work and in which sectors are they engaged?
- What are their specific occupations and the conditions of their work?
- What types of exploitation and abuse they face at wo