A study entitled "Brazil Without Child Labor, When?" shows that if the country does not intensify its measures to combat the exploitation of child labor, it will not succeed in eradicating child labor by 2015.
The child labor eradication in ten years is one of the goals set forth in the United Nation’s (UN) Development Goals of the Millennium. The study was released today by the International Labor Organization (ILO).
According to the study, which designed a panorama of child labor in Brazil over the past ten years, Brazil will still have around 2.7 million working children between the ages of 10 and 17, ten years from now.
This estimate represents a 63% decrease in relation to the indices of child labor registered in 2003 in the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). At that time, 4.6 million children in this age bracket were engaged in the labor market.
The outlook for the elimination of child labor in the 5-9 age bracket is more positive. In 2015, according to the study, 80 thousand children in this group are expected to be part of the labor market, as against 210 thousand children in 2003.
Another conclusion of the study is that, even though child labor is declining, the number of working children is still very high in Brazil.
"In 12 years (from 2003), there will still be a considerable number of cases of child labor. The work fronts, therefore, should be stepped up to make its elimination possible in the next decade," the report states.
According to the coordinator of the study, professor Marisa Deppu, without a bigger effort, the most optimistic estimates suggest that child labor will not be eradicated in the next 17 years, before 2022.
The ILO study, which used data from 1992-2003, contains information on child labor according to age bracket, race, sex, urban versus rural setting, geographical region, and state.
Agência Brasil