Child Labour
One in ten children worldwide is working, and the number rose for the first time in decades.
Severity score
40.7
Serious · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
Around 160 million children are in child labour, roughly half in hazardous work including mining, agriculture and manufacturing. Progress reversed after the pandemic, with the sharpest increases among the youngest children in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
22Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
80People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
34Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
10Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
58Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.