Can social protection policies help end child labour?

Social protection instruments can play an important role in reducing child labour by mitigating poverty and economic vulnerabilities and enhancing poor families’ resilience.

Article | 23 June 2014
The links between social protection and child labour have received more attention with the emergence of conditional cash transfer programmes that explicitly link the receipt of cash benefits to school attendance or similar conditions.

Many programmes have been found to have a significant effect in promoting school enrolment and attendance, yet it is not fully clear whether these effects result directly from the behavioural conditions, or indirectly through the income effect and a stronger emphasis on supply-side factors, that is, in ensuring that schools are actually available and accessible for poor children.

From the few evaluations that have systematically assessed the impact on children’s work, it can be deduced that, while cash benefits tend to have a strong impact on school attendance, they may not reduce child labour to the same extent: many children combine school and work. Reductions in child labour are more evident where cash benefits are integrated with additional programme elements, such as after-school programmes, as in Brazil.

Economic vulnerability is not the only cause of child labour, and social protection is not by itself a complete answer to it. Nonetheless, social protection is a critical pillar of a broader policy response to child labour. Efforts against child labour are unlikely to be successful in the absence of a social protection floor to safeguard vulnerable households and to enable them to seize opportunities and to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

Although other elements of social security systems have not been systematically assessed with regard to their impact on child labour, it can be assumed that they also have a positive effect in so far as they reduce the vulnerability of poor households and address poverty risks that may otherwise promote child labour. This is, for example, the case for social health protection, reflecting the fact that ill-health constitutes a major poverty risk for vulnerable households.

Measures to reduce the income insecurity of adults, including unemployment protection, employment guarantee schemes, disability benefits, maternity benefits and social pensions, also contribute to mitigating vulnerability for poor households, and can contribute to preventing and reducing child labour. Within any broader social security system, building a national social protection floor is particularly relevant to addressing vulnerabilities associated with child labour. Social protection floors provide a set of basic social security guarantees, including a basic level of income security throughout the life cycle and access to essential health care.

These basic guarantees, in turn, are essential in addressing the multifaceted economic and social vulnerabilities which give rise to and perpetuate child labour. Where children and their families enjoy basic income security and access to essential health care, and where the necessary education and other services are in place, child labour can be effectively prevented.

Indeed, evidence available suggests that an approach linking cash and in-kind benefits with access to education and health services can be particularly effective in addressing child labour.