What's Happening?

Poverty and Child Labour

Poverty

Poverty is the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, health care, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them.

The United Nations has estimated that 25,000 people die every day, that’s one person every three and a half seconds, due to hunger or hunger-related causes. Unfortunately, it is children who die most often. Around 28% of all children in developing countries are underweight or stunted largely due to poverty and a lack of resources.

Based on enrolment data, about 72 million primary school aged children in the developing world were not in school in 2005. Less than 1 percent of what the world spends every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and it still didn’t happen. Due to this lack of education nearly 1 billion people (almost 1/6th of the world’s population) entered the 21st century unable to read or write their own names.

Almost half of the world’s population (over 3 billion people) live on less than $2.50 per day and at least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 per day. This problem has led to a major problem of Child Labour in developing countries.

Child Labour

Child Labour refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labour. This practice is considered exploitative by many international organisations and is illegal in many countries. Research by United Nations has highlighted that around 1 in every 6 children in the world today is involved in child labour, doing work that is damaging to their mental, physical and emotional development.

What is more distressing is that over 55% of these children are working under trying and torturous circumstances. They are suffering. Their health is failing and a large number do not live to even see their adolescences, while still more do not live beyond their thirtieth birthday. This is a grave and true situation.

http://www.childlabour.in/child-labour-statistics.htm

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