5th Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour

While progress has been made towards the elimination of child labour, it has also stagnated in recent years and more so with the ongoing pandemic. Accelerating progress will require doing things differently.

For civil society, it would obviously mean more alignment of their messages but also strengthening
collaborations with each other on the ground and at policy level for leveraging collective strengths
towards greater impact. But, it would also mean to strengthening engagement on the issue of child
labour with other CSOs working on human rights and/or SDGs even though child labour may not be
their key focus/thematic area (referred to as non-traditional anti-child labour CSOs for the purpose of this concept note).

Why? Because as we already know that most SDGs are interlinked, and progress on a particular goal can contribute to progress to progress on another. SDGs related to poverty, hunger, health, education, gender, clean water, decent work, climate change, adequate housing, inequality, etc. are connected to the elimination of child labour. A specific example of integration of child labour issues as a hard-to-reach category of children in the work of SDG 4 on education is an obvious case in point.