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Child Labour

Map No. 135

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Nine of the ten territories with the highest proportions of child labourers are in Africa. The anomaly is Bhutan. At the other extreme, Italy which has the lowest proportion of children living there also has a very low percentage of children who work.

The map shows that most child labour occurs in African and Southern Asian territories. India has the highest number of child labourers, twice as many as China where the second highest population of child labourers lives.

No children work in Japan, in Western Europe there are 13 000 child labourers. These are the regions with the smallest workforces of children.

"At our homes we had done a lot of ploughing, planting, weeding and harvesting; we had hewn wood and drawn water; we had tended sheep, goats and cattle; we had done one hundred and one odd jobs." Ndabaninga Sithole, 1959

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide child work force (aged 10-14) that live there.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page