II. What can be done at the country level?

A.Elements of a national strategy against child labour
B.Specific types of action against child labour
C.Other lessons of ILO experience

50.  Fortunately, developing countries, where the vast majority of working children are found, are awakening to the serious social, economic and development implications of child labour. They increasingly recognize that the widespread economic exploitation of children and their employment in conditions harmful to their dignity, morality, safety, health or education seriously undermine national economic and social development objectives. In a competitive world, national prosperity largely depends on human skills, and tolerating child labour is inconsistent with the human resource investments that countries must make to secure their future. For that reason, governments have begun to take a far more vigorous stance against child labour, and to ask searching questions about what action is most viable and effective in controlling it and eventually eliminating it. In particular, poor countries which need to concentrate their efforts and resources on just a few interventions want to know which are most likely to work and how to combine them for maximum effect

51.  The following discussion of desirable action at the country level in regard to child labour is mainly based on recent ILO research and technical cooperation activities. Much of this research is exploratory and often based on case-studies. Furthermore, IPEC is only 4 years old. Therefore, the suggestions which follow should be regarded as preliminary.

A. Elemants of national strategy against child labour
52.  Finding out about child labour. Little is known at the country level about the exact magnitude, nature or effects of child labour. Information is dramatically missing on how many children are working, what they are doing, for how long, at what tasks, whether under hazardous conditions, and so on.

53.  The lack of detailed and reliable data considerably hinders the setting of realistic targets and the design of effective action against child labour. National statistical surveys that provide an accurate and broad picture of the child labour situation at the macroeconomic level are necessary for effective policy and programme development. At the same time, there is a need for a thorough qualitative analysis of the specific groups of child workers and their working and living conditions. In general, an action programme on behalf of working children cannot be successful unless there is a clear picture of the needs, constraints and opportunities of the target group. High-quality information is also a powerful tool for raising awareness as a precursor to action.

54.  Because the advantages of obtaining high-quality data on child labour are so great, and the cost of applying appropriate statistical survey and situation analysis methods so reasonable, it is strongly suggested that all countries set up and/or improve their child labour data collection systems.

55.  Designing a national plan of action against child labour. From ILO experience, it has become clear that no single action against child labour can have a significant impact unless it is anchored in a national plan. Defining and implementing such a plan is the primary responsibility of governments. However, child labour cannot be ended by governments alone. Employers' and workers' organizations as well as other segments of society, including the organizations working for the defence of human rights and the protection of children, also have an important role to play. Such a plan demonstrates that there is a national commitment to address the problem of child labour in a systematic way. It should go beyond a mere statement of goals, and set out concrete measures to combat child labour, along with the necessary resource commitments and a clear division of responsibilities between the various actors concerned. It should not be static, but should be reviewed regularly in the light of changing circumstances and the lessons learned.

56.  It would be unrealistic to believe that the virtually perennial problem of child labour can be solved overnight, or that children can be removed at once from all types of employment or work. Looking at the reality of child labour today, it is clear that it is one of the many problems linked to poverty and underdevelopment and that the resources available to reduce its extent and damaging effects are especially limited in the countries where it is most serious. The number of children at work, even if it is confined to those working in occupations or conditions likely to endanger their physical, intellectual or emotional development, is so high and the resources available to combat this scourge are so scarce that priorities have to be set. Consequently, in the countries where this problem is particularly serious, the national plan should adopt a measured approach to the elimination of child labour. While reaffirming that the ultimate objective of the country is the total and effective abolition of any kind of work, employment or activity likely to prejudice the child's dignity, morality, safety, health or education, the plan should in the first stage focus national efforts on preventing and eliminating the participation of children in economic activities that are most detrimental to them, namely those activities conducted under slavery-like, particularly hazardous or otherwise abusive conditions. In other words, it should concentrate the scarce resources available on the most urgent and serious cases of child labour, that those which are a real affront to the conscience of humankind and that no human society worthy of the name can tolerate, irrespective of its level of economic development.

57.  Determining the most detrimental forms of child labour is not easy, in particular when it relates to identifying those types of employment or work which expose children to particularly grave hazards to their safety or health. In this respect, it is worth reproducing the following statement found in a publication recently issued in the ILO Child Labour Collection.

It is much easier to mobilize public and political will for abolishing demonstrably injurious forms of child labour than it is for, say, prohibiting child work that is popularly regarded as traditional and safe for children.

But by what criteria is it possible to set priorities according to risk? It is certainly helpful to start with a list of industries, occupations and working conditions know to place children in jeopardy, but generic information of this sort does not automatically address the most vexing questions. How does one decide whether one kind of work is more detrimental to children than another? How can one rank injurious effects of different types? Is vision loss worse than lung disease? How much physical risk equates with how much psychosocial jeopardy? How should short- and long-term effects be compared? In setting priorities, such questions are inescapable, but there are no easy or universal answers to them, and the process of deciding whom to consider most at risk necessarily involves an element of subjective reasoning.

Experience shows that questions of this sort have no purely technical solution, and must be resolved by agreement rather than by formula, reflecting realities and cultural values, and therefore differing from place to place. What is important is that concrete, feasible decisions be made about which child work problems require the most urgent attention, and that these decisions enjoy at least a modicum of social credibility and legitimacy. Fortunately, the task of designating children at high risk usually turns out to be easier in practice than in theory. Within a given place, the most dangerous forms of work and the children involved in them tend to stand out when adequate information is available. Knowledgeable people of different institutions and perspectives seem able to agree on who are the most threatened child workers. It is a question more successfully lived through in practice than intellectually agonized over beforehand.

64.  Creating a broad social alliance against child labour. Most initiatives against child labour today still come from non-governmental organizations. Many governments have restricted their role to enacting minimum age legislation, but have been passive in its enforcement. Many trade unions have lacked the capacity to deal with the problem, although a recent upsurge of interest, as evidenced by their growing response to the international campaign against child labour launched by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), bodes well for the future. Individual employers of children, especially in the small enterprise sector, have always been reluctant to enter into discussions on the subject for fear that their economic interests would be directly affected by attempts to replace child workers with adults. Employers' organizations often face difficulties convincing such employers of the contrary.

65.  The burden of the campaign against child labour is far too heavy for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to carry alone. Despite considerable resourcefulness and dedication, their overstretched material and human resources are not equal to the magnitude of the task. Broader social mobilization is required. Government and the social partners need to do their share. They should assume today in developing countries the important roles they played in the past in reducing child labour in industrialized countries.

66.  Three fundamental types of action against child labour can be provided only by the central government: (i) child labour legislation and appropriate enforcement mechanisms; (ii) a national child labour policy that sets public priorities and reaches out to engage all the important social actors; and (iii) a publicly funded system of basic education that ensures quality schooling that is physically and economically accessible to children of even the very poorest families. The last is the most important of all since, without it, whatever initiatives against child labour are undertaken will achieve very limited success. Other levels of government, especially municipal government, can play a crucial role in mobilizing and focusing local human and material resources on specific child labour problems.

67.  No one can deny that trade unions have a key role to play in combating child labour. The most effective means of fully realizing their potential in the struggle against child labour is to be true to their special identity and goals as workers' organizations. Indeed, it is the attainment of basic trade union objectives — jobs, increased wages, improved working conditions, no discrimination of any kind in employment on the basis of sex or race — that can help eliminate child labour.

68.  The capacity of trade unions to perceive and respond to the problem of child labour depends on their level of organization. This is particularly problematic in developing countries, where much of the child labour problem is to be found. It is still sadly the case that freedom of association — the right of workers to form and join organizations of their own choosing — is an objective that has yet to be attained in some countries. In others, emerging trade unions are attempting to consolidate fundamental trade union rights. In most developing countries there remains the basic task of building up organizations from the mass of unorganized labour, for example in the rural sector. Added to this is the mushrooming urban informal sector and subcontracting, which lies outside the scope of trade union organization and the enforcement machinery of government. It is precisely in these sectors that child labour flourishes.

69.  The active involvement of trade unions in combating child labour requires a step-by-step approach. First, their potential in this field will never be realized without raising the awareness of their membership; this requires putting child labour clearly on the agenda, as well as specific workers' education programmes using manuals, videos, slides, etc., and organizing workshops, seminars and conferences. Second, trade unions need to develop the skills and structures that will enhance their capability to act in this field. There are a number of skills required: how to conduct research into the problem of child labour; how to develop effective communication campaigns; how to design and implement specific action programmes on behalf of working children, etc. This must go hand in hand with enabling structures, that is committees and/or officials with the responsibility of taking charge of child labour issues within the trade union at all levels. Third, trade unions are the logical leaders for bringing child labour abuses to light. They can become credible advocates for the protection of children against workplace exploitation by documenting concrete cases of abusive child labour and their effects on the children involved. Fourth, their contribution is essential in informing and mobilizing others. Once workplace abuses of children have been identified, these must be put into messages and effectively communicated to different target audiences — government, employers and the general public — using their own journals or providing newspapers, television and radio with regular features on the problem and what needs to be done. Trade unions can also act as a pressure group, using their own political machinery to help develop broad alliances against child labour which incorporate health professionals, teachers, women's groups, NGOs, political parties, mass media, etc. Fifth, trade unions can also provide direct support to working children through special welfare, education and training projects. The improvement in the quality of apprenticeship and other training schemes for youth is an obvious intervention, as is health and safety education. Sixth, trade unions can play a watchdog role. They are well placed to monitor the effectiveness of legal instruments and the performance of the labour inspectorate in the child labour field. As a result, they can lobby for the updating of legislation in line with international labour standards and the improvement of the inspectorate in terms of quantity and quality.

70.  Finally, workers' organizations are especially well placed to advocate children's right to education, to communicate to large numbers of adult workers and their families the importance of promoting the education of their children and of keeping them as far as possible from entering the labour market prematurely, while at the same time asserting the right of adult workers to adequate remuneration, thereby reducing poor families' dependency on child labour.

71.  Employers and their organizations also have an indispensable role to play in the fight against child labour. Obviously, the best way for individual enterprises to contribute in this field is to adhere strictly to the provisions in national laws and regulations which restrict the conditions under which employers can make use of children in their operations. Where the employment of children is not legally proscribed, they should ensure, in particular, that children are kept away from any dangerous substance or machinery and that their working hours and schedules are such as not to prejudice their school attendance and performance.

72.  There are good reasons for employers and their organizations to be interested in child labour issues. Besides obvious humanitarian and social concerns, combating child labour makes perfect sense on economic and business grounds. Children who are left uneducated or, even worse, are damaged physically or emotionally by early and dangerous work, have little chance to become productive and creative adult workers. By allowing this state of affairs to continue, enterprises — and, in fact, society as a whole — are wasting today human resources that could be in short supply tomorrow. Furthermore, with child labour, a company's reputation is at stake; with millions being spent annually on marketing, a single negative news story or broadcast denouncing the use of child labour in abusive conditions by a major company — either national or multinational — can cause immeasurable damage to its image and that of its brands. The most effective role that such major companies can play today is in setting high standards on workers' rights and the use of child labour, not only for themselves but also for the contractors they work with and the subcontractors of the latter. They are uniquely positioned to become a model for other enterprises in the country which do continue to employ children. In this respect, recent initiatives by important firms to establish their own "codes of conduct" which prohibit the direct or indirect employment of children in producing their products merit more general extension to both national in international companies involved in businesses known to be open to the use of child labour.

73.  As already mentioned, most children in paid work are found in small enterprises in the informal sector. Creating among owners and managers of such enterprises a commitment not to rely on child labour any longer and to employ only adult workers instead is an absolute must. This should become one of the important tasks of national employers' organizations, which can be a major force in combating child labour. To begin with, they can use their direct access to enterprises for creating awareness about the child labour problem and motivate them to do something against it. What is more, they can assume important leadership in helping businesses and industries using child labour to improve their efficiency and competitiveness through production and personnel practices that increase incentives for the employment of adult workers and decrease reliance on children. Historically, this has generally entailed the introduction of improved technology and the expansion of credit and training facilities necessary for smaller and poorer producers to adopt that technology.

74.  Another essential element in the fight against child labour is the active involvement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — whether their sole purpose is to combat child labour, or they pursue more general child protection objectives, or even do not focus primarily on children, as is the case of religious institutions or institutions created for the defence of human rights, for example. First, non-governmental action is most useful to influence the family and community concerns and values that control whether and where children work and to stimulate the required changes in the popular culture. Second, like trade unions, NGOs have a crucial role to play in discovering and publicizing concrete cases of abusive child labour; they are well placed to document areas, activities and workplaces that put working children at serious risk and to denounce the shortcomings in public sector action, in particular failure to enforce relevant laws and regulations. Finally, NGOs are especially good at devising and implementing action programmes on behalf of children already in the labour market; they are close to the children concerned, they know their special needs, and they generally enjoy the trust of the local communities in which these children live and are therefore well placed to mobilize the human and material resources available at that level. That being said, it is regrettable that the attitude of governments towards NGOs acting against child labour has remained suspicious in several countries.

75.  Other segments of civil society can be viable partners in the fight against child labour. Professional media organizations have a special responsibility in informing the public on child labour issues. Universities are also valuable allies, in particular for researching specific aspects of the child labour problems, training the staff involved in field activities and assessing the impact of pilot action programmes undertaken on behalf of working children. Because political resolve is essential in order to tackle child labour problems, parliamentarians have also been recognized as an important partner to involve. Last, but not least, there are millions of teachers and educators who can be motivated to participate in the prevention of child labour at the local and national levels. The role of teachers, educators and their organizations in efforts to combat child labour has been little explored, and their potential to be mobilized in the campaign against the scourge remains largely untapped. However, it would appear from current experience that they can assist in different ways. First, they can influence the children themselves by integrating child labour issues into the curriculum — for instance, the dangers of specific types of employment or work, the alternatives to work, the rights afforded to working children under national laws and regulations and the means of defending them. Second, they can influence the community by informing families on the costs and dangers of child labour; by acting as child labour monitors to help survey the extent of school non-attendance and its relationship to child labour in the community; and by supporting community participation in planning formal and non-formal education programmes to ensure that all child workers and potential child workers are reached. Finally, through their professional associations they can press for educational reforms which make education both more accessible and more attractive to poor families and their children, including providing flexibility in school calendars to accommodate children who work.

76.  To sum up, the fight against child labour provides ample space for the public and the private sectors to work in complementary and cooperative ways. No organization can solve the child labour problem on its own, and concerted efforts are needed by the ILO's constituents and many other groups in society at both the policy and implementation levels.

77.  Creating the institutional capacity to deal with the child labour problem. Defining and implementing the national plan of action against child labour suggested above requires the creation or strengthening, within the government apparatus, of an institutional mechanism with responsibility for: (i) setting priorities in close partnership with the representative organizations of employers and workers and with other relevant groups of civil society; (ii) promoting and coordinating the activities of various ministries and other governmental institutions concerned with child labour (those dealing with labour, education, youth, the family, health and social welfare, the media and the central coordinating units, such as national planning commissions); (iii) encouraging the participation of the private sector and ensuring that measures taken by the public and private sectors complement each other; and (iv) supporting pilot schemes at the local level, both technically and financially, in order to experiment with new ways of preventing child labour or rehabilitating children removed from exploitative or dangerous types of employment or work, evaluate the results of such schemes, adapt their content and promote their application on a larger scale. In many countries, there is no such machinery. In addition, there is an acute need to provide adequate training to the staff working in the child labour field and to those responsible for implementing at the local level direct support programmes on behalf of working children.

B. Specific types of action against child labour
78.  Improving child labour legislation and enforcement measures. Most countries have child labour legislation that establishes a minimum age for admission to employment or work and regulates working conditions for young persons. They entrust the enforcement of that legislation to a public sector inspection authority, authorized to monitor the work premises and to penalize employers for infractions of the law. This legal apparatus has proved most useful in curbing the worst child labour abuses in the urban formal sector, and it is one reason why only a relatively small portion of child labour is now found there.

79.  However, particularly in developing regions, effective legal protection does not often extend beyond urban areas and the formal sector. One reason is that, in many countries, legislation exempts from coverage precisely the kinds of work in which children are most engaged (agriculture, family undertakings, small workshops, domestic service). A necessary first step to expanding protection under the law is to ensure that the main places where children work and the worst forms of child labour are encompassed by national legislation.

80.  Another problem relates to the discrepancies which exist in many countries between the minimum age required by the law to work and that at which it is permitted to leave the school system. In several cases, the minimum age for admission to work is lower than the school leaving age, giving children access to employment before they have completed the minimum number of years of compulsory schooling. If children from impoverished families are legally allowed to work, they will do so and will drop out of school. The opposite situation also poses a problem, however. If the minimum age for admission to work is higher than the school leaving age, children who leave school at the permitted age must wait one or more years before they are allowed to work. There is therefore a need to ensure that national labour and education laws are consistent, as called for in the Minimum Age Convention, 1973 (No. 138).

81.  The main impediment to effective legal protection against child labour is a serious lack of enforcement, which seldom reaches into scattered worksites such as small farms or enterprises and private households. Not only are most inspectorates too thinly staffed and equipped to monitor widely dispersed workplaces, they may also lack authority to enter homes or family businesses, or to make unannounced visits, even where entry is permitted. The expense of trying to extend this system much beyond the formal sector would be high, and some experts think that it would not be a cost-effective means of protecting the working children most in need. For example, a well-known study of the question in India concludes that a major investment in expanding the enforcement of child labour laws would constitute a serious misallocation of resources and that the same amount invested in achieving universal education would more effectively remove a greater number of children from abusive employment.

82.  However, it would be wrong to underestimate the important role that can be played by adequate enforcement machinery. Much can and should be done to upgrade the performance of inspectorates with regard to child labour for those sites which are realistically inspectable. In addition, there is a growing consensus that effective enforcement can be extended to farms, small enterprises and homes outside the formal sector through the systematic participation of local communities in monitoring the working conditions of their children. It has been suggested that labour inspection services could become promoters and tutors of such local initiatives, alerting communities to the importance of protecting their young against hazardous work, and then helping them to organize procedures for identifying and reporting violations of the law. Local involvement in monitoring and reporting the conditions under which children work is indeed essential for the protection of children against abusive forms of employment in most developing countries, and for that reason it deserves full technical and financial support from government.

83.  Extending and improving schooling for the poor. The single most effective way to stem the flow of school-age children into abusive forms of employment or work is to extend and improve schooling so that it will attract and retain them. The ILO therefore has a strong vested interest in seeing that governments provide educational facilities and services that reliably reach and retain current or potential child workers. Although school attendance cannot be relied upon to remove children from part-time work, there is evidence that children in school are less likely to be involved in bonded labour or particularly detrimental forms of work, most of which are inconsistent with regular school attendance.

84.  It is often suggested that basic education should be used as a deterrent to child labour by making it compulsory. Other observers, however, have noted that it is extremely difficult to coerce an unwilling population into school attendance and that the best strategy is to make schooling valuable and attractive to children and their parents. Still others consider that the compulsory element in education policy should be aimed not at children or parents, but at the State, requiring it to provide adequate educational facilities and services to all of its children. The main obstacle to achieving universal basic education is less family or child resistance than the inability of governments to meet demand, and especially to provide adequate educational facilities for the children of the poor in rural areas and burgeoning city shanty towns. In the 1980s and early 1990s resources devoted to education dwindled steadily in many countries. The poor situation of the economy and the effects of structural adjustment policies were the reasons generally given for this decline. This argument is not credible, since one-third of the 116 countries for which 1989/1990 data are available had found sufficient resources to spend more on the military than on education.

85.  It has been widely demonstrated that families are prepared to make major sacrifices for the education of their children when it is economically and physically accessible and truly productive in terms of future employment prospects. For example, IPEC has found that schools become more attractive to poor families when they include practical training in skills that make the children more employable or employable at higher wage rates. Getting working children back into school is often less difficult than expected. For example, in areas where most children have usually worked full time instead of attending school, parental demand for return to school has been stimulated after the first parents were enticed to break with the tradition of child labour. In cases where the income from child work is, in fact, indispensable to the family, it has been possible to convince parents to lighten the children's workload so that school attendance could be accommodated while the child still worked.

86.  A number of countries have sponsored non-formal education programmes targeted specifically at working children. The experience has been mixed. Some programmes have been able to attract and retain working children, sometimes bringing them to literacy much faster than would regular schools. In other cases, non-formal education has been rejected by children and their families as second-rate. IPEC experience suggests that it is both possible and more desirable to mainstream working children into the formal schooling and vocational training system than to create for them a parallel "second-class" educational structure.

87.  Using economic incentives. Efforts to reduce child labour are more likely to succeed if laws and regulations (along with their sanctions and penalties) are accompanied by economic incentives to reduce the supply of child labour. The rationale for such incentives is that much of child labour is rooted in poverty and that poor families need the income deriving from the employment of their children; where this income is not replaced by some cash or in-kind payment, eliminating child labour from one particular occupation or industry may not solve the problem, as liberated children may merely transfer to other activities that are just as harmful.

88.  The types of economic incentives usually found include the payment of cash grants to children or their families, the provision of free school lunches, other in-kind payments for school (e.g. stationery or clothing) and the waiver of school fees. They may also comprise income-generating schemes for poor families in communities with a high concentration of working children and apprenticeship or other school-work programmes for children that provide education or training with income as an alternative to child labour. Many NGOs have been providing such incentives for some time and some governments are experimenting with the concept.

89.  The economic incentives-based approach has not yet been systematically assessed to determine whether it really works. Questions such as whether economic incentives go to the right people, or have the desired effect on children, and whether the programmes produce social benefits greater than their cost, have not yet been answered. A recent study by the Employment Department of the ILO addressed these highly important questions by asking NGOs implementing economic incentives programmes about their experience and opinions. Results suggest that incentives are useful for removing children from child labour, even though many practical problems were mentioned regarding sustaining and developing them on a larger scale.

90.  Much attention has recently been turned to the possibility of also using negative economic incentives to discourage the employment of children. World-renowned manufacturers are urged by consumers in developed countries to look into the conditions under which their products are being produced and to ensure, in particular, that their contractors in developing countries do not resort to child labour. In Europe, several department stores have decided not to sell products such as carpets unless they are certified as having been made without child labour. These powerful movements by consumers and manufacturers alike have been accompanied by perhaps even more powerful efforts on the legislative and trade fronts, as evidenced by the hot debate on the incorporation of a social clause into international trade agreements. In addition, the United States has adopted a Generalized System of Preferences, as has the European Union, to promote better labour standards and thereby discourage the use of child labour. Furthermore, a bill banning the import into the United States of goods produced by children (the Harkin Bill), though not yet enacted, has generated concern among employers and governments in countries heavily dependent on the United States for their exports.

91.  The basic question raised by these initiatives is whether they are likely to bring an early end to child labour. In this respect, there is no doubt that they have raised the awareness of child labour and forced some governments and business leaders to take more vigorous action against it. However, they have also had unintended consequences. For example, the mere threat of trade sanctions led employers in the garment industry of an Asian country to abruptly dismiss dozens of thousands of children in an effort to forestall such sanctions; the end result was that the dismissed children shifted to other occupations, which were often more hazardous than the jobs they used to perform in the garment industry; there were no instances of children returning to school. This example suggests that measures which concentrate solely on the export sector may drive child labour underground, into the less regulated domestic economic sectors. It also suggests the need to move children away from the workplace in a phased and planned manner, instead of simply throwing them overnight, and unaided, into a far worse situation.

92.  The suggestion has been made that instead of or parallel to imposing, or threatening to impose, trade sanctions against poorer countries resorting to child labour in their export-related activities, developed countries should assist these poorer countries in solving their child labour problems, both in export-oriented activities and in domestic economic sectors, including through special rewards in the trade field when it is proven that they have achieved good progress in their fight against this scourge. This suggestion seems to deserve careful examination, as does the more general issue of international cooperation in the child labour field, its desirable content and modalities.

C. Other lessons of ILO experience
93.  This experience suggests that child labour is a solvable problem, in which significant progress can be made by well-designed policies and action if there is sufficient public and government interest and enough support has been mobilized. There is no need to await general prosperity or other prior conditions before acting against it: much can be done now, even under the worst circumstances, that will have a positive effect on the problem of child labour. On the other hand, the task is very demanding. Problems are complicated and require a sophisticated understanding and action on various fronts that mobilize both government and civil society.

94.  ILO experience clearly shows that children themselves and their parents can be the first line of defence against child labour, and that there is a need to explore and develop practical ways in which they may effectively be empowered to participate in their own protection through three essential steps: awareness, participation and organization.

95.  Not everything can be done at once. Priority should be given to strategic forms of action — those most likely to have a major impact. The above discussion suggests that any child labour strategy at the national level should, at a bare minimum, include both targeted action to eliminate immediately the most intolerable forms of child labour — such as bonded labour or work in highly hazardous conditions — and a more broad-based effort to get all children into schools or other suitable training.

96.  Developing countries are now exploring supply-side approaches to child labour more intensively than did modern industrialized countries at a similar stage in their own development. These approaches typically consist in providing services to children or their families that reduce the likelihood that children will enter the job market or be damaged by the work they do. Such strategies can be precisely targeted and are adapted to diverse conditions. They are best designed close to the children in question, and some countries, such as Brazil and the Philippines, have decentralized responsibility for protection against child labour to the municipal level, providing mechanisms for local government and civil society to pool their efforts through education, welfare, income generation and other programmes targeted at particular groups of working children at risk.

97.  There is much to be learned from developing countries as they accumulate experience in combating child labour under their own conditions, especially through their experimentation with supply-side measures. Their findings and discoveries will be a rich source of new ideas and approaches to complement the existing basic instruments against child labour, such as minimum age legislation, a public sector labour inspectorate and compulsory education.

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