Perhaps you splurged on a handcrafted carpet, without knowing it was made by a seven-year-old from India, where children are chained to looms for 12 hours a day. Maybe you just bought a soccer ball for your son or daughter, without realizing your gift was produced by five-year-old hands inside a dark and silent factory in Pakistan. Even your more mundane purchases -- a leather bag, a shirt, a pair of jeans, or produce from the local grocery store -- could be the product of child labor.

Around the world today, some 250 million boys and girls between the ages of five and 14 are exploited in hazardous work conditions, according to the International Labour Organization. Most of these children live in the developing world, but even in industrialized countries such as the United States, hundreds of thousands of underage boys and girls are at work in sweatshops, farm fields, brothels and on the street.

UNICEF has emerged as a leader in the international movement against disabling, hazardous, and exploitive child labor. In Bangladesh, for example, UNICEF is working in partnership with the government, business leaders and non-governmental organizations to end child labor in the country's garment industry.

Under the program, UNICEF has helped to build 140 schools for 7,000 former child laborers who lost their jobs when a new law went into effect banning anyone under the age of 14 from working in a clothing factory. These children are paid a small stipend to help offset lost wages and qualified adult relatives are being offered their jobs. Such intervention is critical in a country like Bangladesh, where poor children are often forced to go to work if their parents or other relatives can't find jobs.

By providing children with an education and job skills training, this innovative UNICEF initiative seeks to break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy that has trapped so many people in a life of extreme hardship throughout Bangladesh.

Other strategies in UNICEF's fight against child labor include providing credit to poor families, advocating compulsory education in countries like India, and persuading corporations to adopt codes of conduct stating they will not employ children under conditions that violate the Convention on the Rights of the Child. For more information about UNICEF's work in this area, you can read the 1997 State of the World's Children, which examines the many ways young people are exploited by adults in the workplace.

Do you want to join our efforts to provide a better life for working kids?

Click here to make a donation and help us to put an end to the shocking and dangerous practice of child labor.

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