World Day against Child Labor is observed on June 12 each year. The theme for the 2010 event, “Go for the goal… End Child Labor,” highlights the building of a political and popular commitment to tackling child labor, with social patterns and civil society playing a lead role in advocacy and awareness raising efforts.

Generally speaking, child labor is work for children that harms them or exploits them in some way – physically, mentally, morally, or by blocking their access to education.

Although not all work is bad for children, something about some work may make it exploitative. For instance, a child who delivers newspapers before school might actually benefit from learning how to work, gain some responsibility, and earn something for it. But when a child is not paid, he is being exploited.

An estimated 158 million children aged 5-14 years of age are engaged in child labor, roughly, one in six children in the world. Millions of children worldwide work to help their families in ways that are neither harmful nor exploitative.

But millions are also engaged in hazardous situations or conditions, such as working in mines, working with chemicals and pesticides in agriculture, or working with dangerous machinery. They foil as domestic servants in homes, laboring behind the walls of workshops and factories, and hidden from view in plantations. Children living in the poorest households and in rural areas are most likely to be engaged in child labor. Those burdened with household chores are mostly girls.

Millions of girls who work as domestic servants are especially vulnerable to exploitation and abuse.

It has been a decade since the coming into force of the International Labor Organization’s Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. Millions of child laborers have benefitted from the Convention’s drive against such practices such as the use of children in slavery, forced labor, trafficking, debt bondage, forced or compulsory recruitment for armed conflict, and all forms of work that are like to harm the safety, health, or morals of children. But despite the progress, much remains to be done.

Labor often interferes with the education of children and ensuring that all children go to school and that they get a good quality education are key to preventing child labor.