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The Race to Rescue is needed now more than ever.

The International Labour Organization recently released a new study with 2020 numbers about the estimated number of children in child labor. In short, what we can definitively say is that the Race to Rescue is needed now more than ever.

Some highlights:

The number of kids in child labor has risen for the first time in two decades – an 8.4 million increase in the past 4 years. We are running the Race to Rescue to protect children from the worst form of child labor: slavery.

COVID-19 has put 9 million children at risk of being pushed into child labor due to the impact of school closures, job instability and income loss among vulnerable families.

Children aged 5 to 11 years now account for just over half of the 160 million children worldwide in child labor.

This report calls for a renewed sense of urgency, and the Race to Rescue is exactly the kind of concrete action pledge that individuals can make in response to these staggering new numbers.

As you communicate, here are some helpful notes of clarification:

“Slavery” is defined as a subset of “labor”. As the report states, “Children may not be in hazardous or the worst forms of labor, but are still simply too young to work.” It’s when they are forced to work that they count as being enslaved.

The statistics we’ve quoted frequently until now (“40 millions slaves, 1:4 is a child”) are from a previous ILO study from 2016. The study just released does not update those numbers. What we can indirectly infer is that if the number of children in child labor has increased dramatically, then the number of children in slavery and vulnerable to slavery is trending in the wrong direction as well.

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READ THE ILO PRESS RELEASE

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