• One in seven children is a child labourer: that's nearly 14 per cent of the children in the age group 5-14 years. • One in five children do not go to school – this is nearly 18 per cent of the children in the age group (primary school). • Most of them (57 percent) were girls! Huge numbers of them work as child labourers. • There are over 238 million young people living on less than one dollar a day. • 218 million children toiling in the world and 126 are engaged in the undeniable worst form of child labour.

It has been 7 years since the world leaders committed to the 8 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the commitments for Education For All (Dakar Framework of Action), It has been 8 years since the ILO Convention 182 of the worst forms of child labour accepted by world.

07 July 2007 (07.07.07) marks the midway to the international community’s commitments for creating a better world for its citizens. What have we achieved is the BIG QUESTION now. 

There are so many pressing human needs - it is hard to prioritise them. We need to combat HIV and other epidemic diseases, as well as terrorism, drug trafficking, and military conflicts. We need clean water, sanitation, health care and immunisations, and adequate nutrition - not to mention environmental protection and an adequate standard of living. The list goes on and is daunting. But, we ought to think of not only how many human rights issues are linked to child labour, but how many of these issues can be addressed by redirecting millions child labourers to school - for example, HIV education, immunisations, nutrition, etc. Quality education can make an important contribution to a culture of global tolerance and world peace and security.

Poverty: Two of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) relate directly to education. MDG 2 aims to achieve universal primary education by 2015, ensuring that children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling. MDG 3 - to promote gender equality and empower women - seeks to eliminate gender disparity in education. Its first target was to get as many girls as boys into school by 2005

E-9 (nine most populous countries in the world) members are Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan. The population ages 0-14 in the E-9 countries, as a per cent of world total (2001), is 54.5 per cent, which means more than half of the world’s concerned population is concentrated in the E-9 countries. 94 per cent of out-of-school children live in developing countries (least developed alone account for over one third) and 47 per cent are concentrated in the E-9 countries.

It would cost around 30 US cents per child per day to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education.

The MDGs and child labour are intimately linked. The links are mostly straightforward and tend to run both ways. Poverty and lack of education provision constitute the principal common grounds. Indeed, it is poverty associated with social injustice and social exclusion that is most closely related to child labour. Even in countries or regions of countries, which are not rich there are examples of governments which have made the political decision to invest above all in the key public services of health and education ensuring education for all.

The reasons for the modest progress in achieving the MDG's are the policy incoherence. Only two of the Big Five countries are among the 14 time-bound countries – Pakistan and Bangladesh. Four of the E-9 countries are among the 14 time-bound countries – Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh. Ten of the 14 time-bound countries (El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey) have out-of-school populations of less than 20 percent. Only two of the 14 Time-Bound countries are also both Big Five and E-9 countries. Three of the five countries invited to the FTI have out-of-school populations of less than 20% - Albania, Bolivia, and Uganda. Five of the 16 FTI countries have out-of-school populations of less than 25%. None of the Big Five Countries are on the FTI None of the E-9 Countries are on the FTI