Logo UNICEF Innocenti
Office of Research-Innocenti
menu icon

Developing new strategies for Understanding Children's Work and its impact

A new dialogue between UNICEF, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Bank was initiated in 1999 to ensure greater information sharing on child labour issues between the three agencies. Each agency is committed to improve understanding, both of the economic exploitation of children and of ways to eradicate such exploitation, through the generation of reliable statistics, analysis and information The joint inter-agency project, which follows on from the Agenda for Action established by the International Conference on Child Labour in Oslo in 1997, was launched on a full-time basis in December 2000. It aims to improve child labour research, data collection and data analysis; to enhance local and national capacity for data collection and research; and to improve the assessment of existing interventions. The project also aims to minimise duplication of efforts among the three agencies, and to identify major information gaps. As well as assessing the quality of existing data, the project is developing indicators that chart the dimensions of child labour and relate them to income, gender, health condition and education. Several databases containing information that is pertinent to child labour research have already been created and posted on the project website The project is steered by an inter-agency group with a co-ordinating body based in the Centre.