Worst Forms of Child Labour Data

Africa
Total Child Labour REGIONAL STATISTICS

*Of the estimated 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 who are economically active, the proportion of child labour around the world is 32% in Africa. In economic activity participation rate of children, which is estimated at a little more than two children out of five (or 41%) of the total children 5-14 years old. (ILO - IPEC, Kebebew Aghagrie, Statistics on Working Children and Hazardous Child Labour in Brief, Geneva: 1997 revised April 1998)
Child Slavery -
Child Trafficking

GENERAL NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

* In Africa, there is limited documentation on labour trafficking within the region. It is recognized that young African women have been quite widely trafficked to the European sex trade. In the mid-1990s there was a wave of reported trafficking from West Africa, in particular Ghana and Nigeria, to Italy, the Netherlands and other European countries. (ILO. Report of the Director General, Stopping forced labour, Global Report under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, International Labour Conference, 89th Session2001, Geneva: ILO)

Child Prostitution

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Children in Crime

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Child Soldiers REGIONAL STATISTICS

* The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers believes that more than 120,000 children under 18 years of age are currently participating in armed conflicts across Africa, some no more than 7 or 8 years of age. In recent years, the countries most affected by this problem have been Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda.In the past two decades the Middle East and North Africa region has witnessed some of the worst and most egregious cases of the exploitation of children as soldiers. . In the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, thousands of Iranian children, many straight from school, were used by popular militias in human wave attacks against Iraqi forces, often given a symbolic key to the paradise promised them as martyrs. The conflict in Sudan has long been recognized as one of the worst child soldier problems anywhere in the world. Thousands of children as young as 12 have been forcibly recruited into government-aligned and separatist groups in the south of the country.(CSUCS, Global Report on Child Soldiers - 2001, 12 June 2001)


Domestic Child Servants GENERAL NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS

* The trafficking of child domestic workers - within and across borders - is a fastgrowing informal-sector activity in West and Central Africa. In most countries of the region, internal trafficking from rural to urban areas is common. Cross-border trafficking, instead, occurs mainly from Benin, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo to the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, equatorial Guinea, Gabon and, again, Nigeria, which like Benin is both a country of origin and a receiving country.( Innocenti Digest 5, Child Domestic Work, UNICEF, May 1999 citing Veil, L., UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office, 'The Issue of Child Domestic Labour and Trafficking in West and Central Africa', study prepared for a sub-regional workshop on 'Trafficking in child domestic workers, in particular girls in domestic service in West and Central Africa', held in Cotonou, Benin, on 6-8 July 1998.)


Other Hazardous Child Labour -

 

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