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Foreword
Since its inception 75 years ago, the ILO has been preoccupied with the question of child labour. It has, therefore, been endeavouring for a long time to study the plight of working children and assist in the formulation and adoption of various international standards aimed not only at the protection of working children, but at the eventual eradication of child labour globally. Despite international standards and national laws and regulations, however, the practice continues to exist and, today, hundreds of millions of the world's children toil in non-schooling work, much of it under hardship or hazardous conditions which are detrimental to the health, education and normal development of the children themselves.

In an effort to enhance the effectiveness of the ILO in certain fields within its mandate through more concerted interdepartmental collaboration, three major projects were formulated by the Office and launched at the beginning of the 1992-93 biennium, with the aim of achieving specific and concrete objectives within each of those projects.

One such project, dealing with the "elimination of child labour" was to be carried out by the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) of the ILO, jointly with the financial support of the Government of Germany. A major work element under this project involved the collection and dissemination of comprehensive and up-to-date statistics on working school-age children at the country, regional and global levels. The data, which is to be kept in a special ILO data base and updated regularly as fresh information becomes available, is to be used for in-depth studies of the nature and extent of child labour, and for monitoring the level and trend of the phenomenon in all its aspects. Such data assists in identifying the reasons for child labour and determining the magnitude of the problem, in informing the public and generating awareness of the issues, and in promoting the campaign against the practice at the national level. The availability of detailed and reliable child labour statistics and their analysis on a continuing basis are particularly important for establishing targets, formulating and implementing interventions, and monitoring policies, regulations and programmes aimed not only at the minimization of the negative consequences of child labour in the short term, but most importantly at the eventual elimination of the practice.

As an initial task in the context of the project, the ILO conducted a thorough investigation on the availability and quality of statistical data relating to working children in more than 200 countries and territories, and evaluated their data collection methods and other related aspects. The findings showed that such data did not exist in the majority of the countries, and that much of the official statistics available in a few of the others were deficient in many ways.

The main reason for the dearth and, in many cases, the complete absence of statistics on child labour has been the lack of an appropriate survey methodology, as well as clear concepts, definitions and classifications of the factors and variables relating to child labour. In the absence of adequate data, therefore, many important aspects of the phenomenon still remain unknown, including its magnitude, its nature and the determining causal factors in the different countries and globally.

In an effort to improve the production of quantitative and qualitative data on the young segments of the population affected by the child labour phenomenon at the country level worldwide, in 1993 the ILO/IPEC, in close collaboration with the respective national statistical institutions, carried out experimental surveys in four countries: Ghana, India, Indonesia, and Senegal. The aim of these surveys was to test a specially designed methodology for probing in some detail into children's activities - schooling and non-schooling work, and combinations thereof. The survey instruments were administered in a few selected urban and rural areas in each country on a sample basis at the levels of households, establishments/employers in both the formal and informal sectors, and the children themselves both in the households and those working and living on the streets.

Simple questionnaires were also addressed to elected/appointed leaders, administrators, etc., in the communities/towns/villages of the selected areas in order to identify major locality particulars for assessing their development levels and determining the differential in the incidence of child labour. This investigation was also used for the listing of the households which served as frames for stratification and selection of the required number of households for the sample.

The surveys were formulated to measure statistically as many variables as possible relating in particular to the various non-schooling activities of children in the 5-14 year age group, such as:

their demographic and socio-economic characteristics, including their schooling and training status, occupations, skill-levels, hours of work, earnings and other working and living conditions; for example, the hardships and risks they face at their workplace which are detrimental to their health, education, physical and mental development, etc.;

the socio-economic characteristics of their parents, guardians or other relatives with whom they live, as well as the particulars of their employers;

how long and where the children have been working and the reasons for working, their own immediate and future plans and those of the employers using children in their workforce;

the perceptions of the parents/guardians about their working youngsters and those of the children themselves and their employers.

The manual is aimed at assisting individual countries in the collection of reliable detailed child labour data, either by attaching the methodology as a module to an ongoing national survey programme (which has the advantage of cost-effectiveness), or by conducting a free-standing child labour inquiry at regular intervals through the application of the methodology. Depending on the level of detail of the data needed and on the availability of resources, the scope of the child labour survey could be a "maximum" approach for compiling comprehensive benchmark data on all aspects of children's activities, or a "minimum" approach where the objective is the production of statistical information on core variables or elements considered essential for a quick assessment of specific child labour problems.

The present document is a consolidation into a single report of those prepared by the survey team in each of the four countries with the technical guidance of the ILO. The individual country reports contain much detailed and valuable information on the children, their work, etc., as well as on their parents/guardians and employers, thus making available a wealth of knowledge not only on the child labour situation itself in the areas surveyed, but also on how to probe into the various schooling and non-schooling activities of children, thereby quantifying all facets of the child labour phenomenon.

The ILO/IPEC is very grateful for the excellent cooperation it received from the countries which participated in the experimental exercises and, in particular, for the quality of professional work achieved by the survey teams and their respective leaders, despite the constraints of time and resources.

The ILO Bureau of Statistics has been directly responsible for all the statistical activities related to child labour, including the development of the survey methodology and the provision of advisory services and technical backstopping to the countries concerned.