Throughout 2020 the COVID-19 crisis posed an urgent risk to children, keeping millions out of school and potentially pushing them into child labour. Responding quickly to emerging needs, last year the ECLT Foundation took essential steps in the countries where we work, to support children, farmers, and families. The new Global Child Labour Estimates confirm that child labour is rising, with the main sector affected being agriculture, showing that support and collaboration continues to be greatly needed.
ECLT’s Annual Report 2020 highlights some key areas of intervention relating to COVID-19 which have reached over 300,000 people in the last year alone. During the COVID-19 crisis, we carried out a rapid assessment in the areas where we work to identify the exact needs of rural communities at this difficult time. As a result, working with partners on the ground, our programmes focused on:
- • Raising awareness and supporting good hygiene and access to water to prevent COVID-19 infections
- • Helping to ensure children could access scholastic materials and on-line learning
- • Supporting schools to reopen safely
Top numbers from 2020
In addition to COVID-19 specific activities, we also continued offering support to rural families in the fight against child labour. Here are just a few of our top numbers from our ongoing programmes: 25,000+ children were helped to get out of or stay out of child labour 16,200+ households learned skills to increase their income, access credit and manage finances 1,000+ stakeholders including unions, governments and businesses, were brought together across commodity industries like tea, cotton, coffee, tobacco, sisal, cashew, citrus, sugar, and many more
Communicating meaningful impact
This year in our Annual Report we go beyond the numbers to show how our work helps to advance progress against indicators and targets the National Action Plans to Eliminate Child Labour in the countries where we work and in the Sustainable Development goals. Check out the "Country Highlights" section for more information.
