Child Labour and Educational Disadvantage – Breaking the Link, Building Opportunity

Compulsory education has a vital role to play in eradicating child labour. Getting children out of work and into school could provide an impetus for poverty reduction and the development of skills needed to boost growth, generate jobs and create more inclusive societies. However, the linkages between child labour and educational disadvantage are two-way. Poverty forces many households to withdraw children from school and send them to work. But many children are working at least in part because education is unaffordable, inaccessible, or seen as irrelevant. Put differently, failures in education policy can increase the number of children drawn into labour markets. It follows that strategies for the eradication of child labour have to tackle the underlying source of the problem in an integrated fashion, combining more stringent enforcement of rules and incentives to combat poverty with improved education provision.