By: Aastha Jha
The world is moving away from a time of cooperation and shared global goals toward one marked by conflict, competition, and uncertainty. As global priorities shift, what does it mean for 138 million children (UNICEF & ILO,2025) in labour, for 838 million people living in poverty (World Bank,2025) and 122 million people displaced by conflict (UNHCR,2025).
As governments redirect resources from basic human rights towards military expenditure, the consequences for the most vulnerable populations become harder to ignore.
One of the consequences of this shift is the reduction of developmental aid. In 2024, Official Development Assistance amongst OECD donor countries was cut by 7% (OECD,2025). These donor countries, with some of the highest per capita income of the world, cut assistance that was helping some of the most vulnerable populations in some of the most volatile regions of the world.
When developmental aid declines, already delicate support systems are put under pressure, especially in countries facing conflict, public health crisis and climate shocks. Without reliable safety nets, families are left with very few choices and many turn to child labour to survive. For example, in Ethiopia, drought and economic stress have pushed rural households to rely more heavily on children’s labour in agriculture (FAO,2023). In the Democratic Republic of Congo, conflict-affected mining regions continue to report high levels of child labour (USDOL,2024).
The decline in aid in favour of war is an unfortunate but very real development in today’s world. The ones in position of geographical, economic and political privilege are refusing to help those who need it the most. To see the contrast more clearly, we must look at the data from the countries that have withdrawn aid and compare it to the data from the ones receiving aid. In high-income countries, roughly 85% of the children have access to social protection benefits, while in low-income countries, the coverage remains around 9%. The region with the highest number (87 million) of child labourers (Sub-Saharan Africa) in the world is also the region where most of the children have no coverage of social protection. In countries such as Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland, social protection systems cover nearly all children. In contrast, fragile states such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (2.5%), Sudan (8%) and Ethiopia (4.5%) have a very small portion of children covered. (ILO,ILOSTAT)
These are also countries that have been in long drawn wars, displacing millions of people. This shows that violence caused by conflicts hits children the hardest.Children who are not protected by any welfare schemes are pushed out of schools and forced to work in hazardous conditions, threatening their childhood and their lives. Children who are protected by these schemes in high-income countries survive these shocks and are not forced to abandon their education and work. So, while donor countries have established safety net for their children, the children in countries receiving assistance suffer from shocks and sudden withdrawals of safety nets as the world around us changes.
These patterns reveal that child labour is not simply a labour rights violation; it is an indicator of the vulnerability of an economy during conflict and other shocks. With new global conflicts arising so frequently, it would be naive not to fear more families pushed into poverty and more children pushed into labour.
As we let that reality sink in, the question remains what each stakeholder must do to stop this fear from turning into reality. What can we do to protect these children?
In February 2026, as aid budgets were being cut, governments, civil society, trade unions, and international organisations gathered in Marrakech for the Sixth Global Conference on the Elimination of Child Labour. The Marrakech Framework for Action that emerged builds on the Durban Call to Action of 2022, but the world it was adopted into is considerably less hospitable to its ambitions. The question is not whether the framework points in the right direction. It does. The question is whether the political will exists to follow it there.
The framework rests on three priorities, each of which cuts against the grain of current global trends. The first is decent work for adults. This is the most fundamental and the most difficult: when household income is sufficient to cover basic needs, fewer families face the calculation that sends children to work instead of school. Wages, labour protections, and employment opportunities for adults are not peripheral to the child labour problem they are its core. Yet these are precisely the investments being crowded out as governments redirect resources elsewhere.
The second is social protection.The evidence here is unambiguous: cash transfer programmes in Brazil and Mexico reduced child labour participation by roughly 20–25% among beneficiary households. Social protection does not just alleviate poverty, but it also builds household and community resilience that keeps children in school. The countries withdrawing aid are, in most cases, the same countries whose own children are comprehensively protected by exactly these systems. That contradiction deserves to be named plainly.
The third priority that carries the most weight precisely because governments are becoming less reliable is corporate accountability in global supply chains. An estimated 1.56 million children work in cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana alone, supplying the chocolate that fills supermarket shelves in the same high-income countries now cutting development budgets. Voluntary commitments by the industry have existed for over two decades. The children are still there. What is different now is the arrival of mandatory due diligence legislation, most significantly the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive which for the first time makes identifying and addressing child labour in supply chains a legal obligation rather than a reputational choice. The test will be in implementation: whether these laws produce genuine change in communities or are reduced to audit exercises that protect brands without protecting children.
The world described at the opening of this article- 138 million children in labour, 838 million people in poverty, 122 million displaced did not arrive by accident. It is the cumulative result of political choices: to underfund social protection, to tolerate exploitative supply chains, to treat the suffering of distant children as someone else’s problem. The international community set itself a deadline to end all of this by 2030, under SDG Target 8.7. That deadline is five years away and the trajectory is moving in the wrong direction. The Marrakech Framework names clearly who is responsible and what is required but frameworks do not protect children; political will does. As the world begins to shape the post-2030 development agenda, it must answer one question honestly: if we could not eliminate child labour in an era of relative cooperation and growing aid, what will it take in an era that looks nothing like that?