Football and Child Labour

The Red Card Campaign: How has football contributed towards the elimination of child labour at global level?

ILO/IPEC teamed up with the African Football Federation to launch a global campaign against child labour at the African Cup of Nations, 2002. It aims to use the world's most popular sport to mobilise public opinion against child labour.

Today, all across Africa, millions of children are going to work instead of school.

They work on farms and plantations, in mines and quarries, in factories, in shops and as servants in homes. Some have been sold and trafficked into slave-like conditions. Others are forced into a living nightmare of prostitution or armed conflicts.

Robbed of their chance for an education - for a better life - virtually all of Africa's child labourers are condemned to lifelong poverty. It is a blight on Africa's present and a mortgage on Africa's future.

Many of the football players who gathered in Mali for the Cup of Nations tournament have overcome similar circumstances of severe poverty to become the champions they are today.

In this spirit of inspiration and hope, the International Labour Organization launched the "Red Card to Child Labour" campaign in partnership with CAF and COCAN. During the three weeks of the tournament, billions of people in Africa and throughout the world were able to hear the message that the worst forms of child labour must be eradicated, as a matter of urgency.

The Campaign

Football is the world's most popular sport. It galvanizes people throughout the world. For young people, in particular, it offers excitement and inspiration.

This campaign aimed to seize the opportunity offered by the African Cup of Nations 2002 to make the public aware of the harsh reality of child labour and to encourage people to support the global movement against child labour.

This initiative, which started in Africa, progressively extended to Latin America, Asia and Europe, because of the huge attention paid to major football tournaments. The ILO plans to build partnerships around such events because of the unique opportunity they offer to reach unprecedented numbers of people throughout the world with a simple message: "Red Card to Child Labour."

The ultimate event in this campaign hopefully will be to celebrate the universal ratification of the convention against the worst forms of child labour at the World Cup football tournament in 2006.

The ILO And The Global Movement Against Child Labour

Throughout the world, 250 million children between 5 and 14 years of age are victims of child labour. 80 million of these are in Africa.

In cooperation with hundreds of partner organizations around the world, the ILO, via its International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), is active in more than 75 countries, removing children from abusive child labour, providing them with rehabiliation and education and providing their families with income-generating alternatives.

At the same time, IPEC is campaigning globally to raise awareness about child labour and to persuade governments to adopt international legal standards that commit countries to immediately ban the "worst forms" of child labour. In less than three initial years, more than 100 governments ratified this international convention on the worst forms of child labour, including more than 30 in Africa.

The political will clearly exists and the world is uniting to declare the worst forms of child labour must end.