Child Labour & Educational Disadvantage – Breaking the Link, Building Opportunity

Compulsory education has a vital role to play in eradicating child labour. Getting children out of work and into school could provide an impetus for poverty reduction and the development of skills needed to boost growth, generate jobs and create more inclusive societies. However, the linkages between child labour and educational disadvantage are two-way. Poverty forces many households to withdraw children from school and send them to work. But many children are working at least in part because education is unaffordable, inaccessible, or seen as irrelevant. This report, the fourth in a series identifying strategies for accelerated progress towards the 2015 international development goals, maps the scale of the child labour problem, explores its impact on education, and sets an agenda for reform.