By Sani Idris-Abdulrahman

A Kaduna-based NGO, Beacon of Transformative and Inclusive Development Centre (BEACON) has called for institutional reforms to end child labour in Africa and Nigeria in particular.

The Executive Director, Mrs Abigail Olatunde, made the call in a statement in Kaduna on Thursday, to commemorate the 2025 World Day Against Child Labour.

Olatunde stressed that child labour requires free and quality education for all children; social protection that lifts families out of poverty; and labour reforms that close legal loopholes and extend protections to informal work.

She also stressed the need for community engagement that challenges harmful norms and defends children’s rights.

She said that millions of children in Nigeria and the African continent wake up every morning not to the promise of learning but to the demands of labour.

She said that from farms to households, markets to mines, these children carry the burden of a broken promise that every child has a right to a safe, protected, and quality education.

“Today, as we commemorate the World Day Against Child Labour, we must move beyond symbolic recognition to confronting the scale of the crisis and commit to the needed structural changes to end it.

“In Nigeria, 15 per cent of children aged five to 14, representing 6.8 million children are in child labour, while another 35.3 per cent juggle between school and work.

“Among adolescents aged 15 to 17, 21.9 per cent work full-time, while 45.3 per cent, nearly half of their population combine school with labour.

“A 2021 study in Enugu found that 71.7 per cent of junior secondary school students engaged in child labour, with over a third facing hazardous conditions.

This, she added, was not just about work, but also about survival in an unequal system.

She added that 35.2 per cent of working Nigerian children were exposed to hazardous environments like quarrying, mining, and sexual exploitation.

She further said that in domestic settings, one in five children work over 42 hours a week, with many traumatised while 15.6 per cent show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

She also said that one in three Nigerian children was out of school with girls’ school attendance falling below 48 per cent in Northern Nigeria.

“Among child domestic workers, 19 per cent have no access to education at all,” she added.

At the continental level, Olatunde said that Africa holds the highest global rate of child labour currently at 20 per cent, representing 72.1 million children, with 31.5 million in hazardous work.

She said that the youngest were the most affected with 59 per cent of them between the ages of five and 11.

She pointed out that rural children and those in poverty bear the heaviest load.

According to her, child labour thrives where poverty persists, where education is weak, where laws go unenforced, and where children’s rights are systemically neglected.

The executive director identified some of hidden drivers of child labour as Poverty and exclusion, with 46.9 per cent of the poorest African children in labour, while only 23.7 per cent were from wealthy households.

Other drivers, she said, included rural marginalisation, legal contradictions and cultural systems, especially the Almajiri system in Northern Nigeria that forces children into the streets to beg and find menial jobs.

“At BEACON, we believe that inclusive development is the only sustainable path forward.

“Today, we speak not just for the 15 million children working in Nigeria, but for every child denied their right to learn, play, and dream.

“Let us build a future where no child’s potential is cut short by hardship, because a just society does not steal childhood, it protects it,” she said. (NAN)

Edited by Philip Yatai