The number of child laborers has fallen by 44% across the world since 2000, even as the world’s population has grown. There were 137.6 million child laborers in 2024, down from 245.5 million in 2000, says the International Labor Organization. Meanwhile, the world’s population has grown from roughly a third, from 6.2 billion people to 8.1 billion people. So a much smaller fraction of the labor force now consists of children than was the case back in the 20th century.
54 million child laborers work in hazardous occupations. “In 2017, four African nations (Mali, Benin, Chad and Guinea-Bissau) witnessed over 50 per cent of children aged 5–14 working. Worldwide agriculture is the largest employer of child labor,” notes Wikipedia. Even in the world’s poorest countries, where bans on child labor are seldom enforced, there has been a “a decline in child labor over the preceding half decade.” “Child labor was steadily declining in the 20th century” United States even before it was banned in 1938.
“The International Labor Organization (ILO)‘s Worst Forms of Child Labor Convention (No. 182) commits countries to prohibiting and eliminating the worst forms of child labor, such as slavery, forced labor, and work that is dangerous to children’s health or morals. Some countries allow children to work under certain conditions, such as in family businesses or in agricultural settings, provided it does not interfere with their education or health,” explains an AI Overview.
“Sex-selective abortion—the infamous practice of aborting fetuses, usually girls, because of their sex—has become much less common in recent years,” notes The Doomslayer. The number of sex-selective abortions has fallen by more than 60 percent in China and India.
Last year, the first child ever was cured of a brutal type of brain cancer that previously always killed kids who had it.
Vaccination has cut child deaths by two-thirds in Burundi, one of the world’s poorest nations, over the last 20 years, even though Burundi is horrifically poor. Burundi has a per capita income of $195, far lower than even war-ravaged countries like Somalia, Yemen, and South Sudan. Over 80% of all workers in Burundi are farmers, the highest percentage of any nation on Earth. That’s because Burundi is just poor to support service or manufacturing industries, and its farmers grow so little food that they can’t afford to buy much in the way of goods or services.
In past centuries, women and girls spent much of their days painstakingly spinning thread or yarn for clothes. “At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke.”
Thankfully, today, clothes are made quickly and inexpensively in factories.
