The Work No Child Should Have to Do

This week’s Field Notes began with a number: 138 million children are still in child labor worldwide. That number has fallen significantly, but it also represents a promise the world failed to keep, the goal of ending child labor by 2025.

Looking across global supply chains made one thing clear: child labor rarely begins with a child simply choosing to work. Behind it are families struggling with poverty, schools that are too expensive or difficult to reach, weak social protection, and markets that reward low production costs.

The cocoa industry shows how these forces come together. In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, an estimated 1.56 million children are involved in child labor in cocoa production. Many work on family farms where poverty and limited access to quality education make children's labor part of a family's economic survival.

This is why simply removing children from workplaces cannot be the entire solution. Fairtrade's community projects, from classrooms and school meals to bicycles and clean water, show that preventing child labor can begin by making education realistically accessible. And supply-chain monitoring reminds us that companies cannot treat exploitation as someone else's problem simply because it occurs several steps away from the final product.

The four stories changed the question for me. Instead of asking only, “How do we stop children from working?”, we should also ask:

What makes a family need a child's labor in the first place?

That distinction matters for the way we think about human rights at Megaphone. Advocacy should make violations visible, but it should also trace them back to the systems that produce them.

Child labor may be where the problem becomes visible. Poverty, unequal access to education, and the structure of global markets are often where it begins.