by Eva Charlene Te

Created on: September 10, 2008

Child Labor, Education and Youth Employment: Challenge for Economic Growth and Social Progress.

From September 11-12, 2008, a seminar on child labor, Education, and youth employment will be held in Madrid, Spain.

This two-day seminar organized by the Understanding Children's Work Project (UCWP) and the Instituto Figuerola of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid will aim to present recent research on child labor and its linkages with educational and youth employment outcomes. The seminar will also aim at identifying key information gaps relating to these themes, thereby helping to guide future research efforts.

In 2007, similar seminars series took place in Washington in April and in Paris in December.
This year the World Day against Child Labor was marked around the world with activities to raise awareness that Education is the right response to child labor.

The term "child labor" is often defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.
Child labor refers to work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children; and interferes with their schooling by: depriving them of the opportunity to attend school; obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.

In its most extreme forms, child labor involves children being enslaved, separated from their families, exposed to serious hazards and illnesses and/or left to fend for themselves on the streets of large cities often at a very early age. Whether or not particular forms of "work" can be called "child labor" depends on the child's age, the type and hours of work performed, the conditions under which it is performed and the objectives pursued by individual countries. The answer varies from country to country, as well as among sectors within countries.

According to UNICEF, there is an estimated 250 million children aged 2 to 17 in child labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labor. The most widely rejected forms of child labor include the military use of children as well as child prostitution.
Child labor, education and youth employment is a challenge for economic growth and social progress.

The United Nations (UN) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) consider child labor exploitative, with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that:

...States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.

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