FAO.org

The clock is ticking as the 2025 deadline to end child labour under SDG 8.7 rapidly approaches, and the challenge remains critical. 160 million children are still engaged in child labour, with 70 percent—or 112 million—working in agriculture. At the same time, human rights due diligence laws are putting increasing pressure on companies to ensure their supply chains are free from child labour, to be able to continue access international markets. To avoid this, businesses must urgently implement child labour prevention strategies, invest in robust monitoring systems and align their practices with legal requirements.

Traditional systems based on direct observation remain the most accurate way of monitoring child labour. Yet, they often come with significant drawbacks: they are costly, infrequent, and provide limited territorial coverage and forecasting capacity. This makes it difficult to effectively monitor child labour on a large scale, especially in agriculture.

Due to these data limitations, ministries of labour struggle to reduce child labour, while ministries of agriculture are hindered in their efforts to ensure sustainable agrifood systems. Meanwhile, the lack of reliable data prevents companies from ensuring traceability of child labour within their supply chains, making it difficult for them to meet due diligence requirements across their agrifood value chains.

To address this challenge, FAO is implementing the DIGICHILD Initiative, an innovative pilot project under the framework of the FAO ELEVATE Programme 2024-2025. The initiative aims to explore how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can enhance traditional child labour monitoring methods. These advanced systems offer detailed georeferenced data, allowing for the identification of rural areas with key risk factors that contribute to the persistence of child labour.

Between May 2024 and February 2025, FAO will develop a GIS-based child labour risk estimation index. This index will map and assess rural communities most at risk of child labour by combining various standardized and weighted risk indicators, such as poverty, food insecurity, distance to schools, climate change-related events and more. The aim is to create a comprehensive tool that identifies where the risk of child labour is highest, enabling targeted interventions to address the root causes and reduce its prevalence in agrifood systems.

The index aims to provide public and private decision-makers with more cost-effective, time-efficient data that have higher resolution, broader territorial coverage and forecasting capacity. As a result, DIGICHILD aims to enable mandated ministries to adopt tailored and timely policies and programmes to end child labour in agrifood systems, foster anticipatory action rather than sole remediation, support corporate efforts towards due diligence compliance and strengthen safeguard systems of agricultural programmes.

By February 2025, the DIGICHILD Index will be piloted through FAO’s Hand in Hand Geospatial Platform in Uganda and Honduras. Both countries are part of the Hand in Hand Initiative, as well as Alliance 8.7 pathfinder countries—committed to accelerating efforts to end child labour in all its forms by 2025. In addition, these countries are also beneficiaries of the EU-funded “CLEAR Supply Chains - Ending Child Labour in Supply Chains” programme.

To ensure the DIGICHILD Index is effective in supporting each country's efforts to monitor and address child labour in agriculture, FAO is adopting a participatory approach at both the global and country levels. This approach aims to gather feedback and secure validation from key partners. In July 2024, FAO conducted the first online consultations with stakeholders in Uganda and Honduras to introduce the initiative and gather initial feedback on important aspects of the index, including risk indicators, data sources, and weights.

For the same purpose, in October 2024, FAO organized the first online consultation with global child labour practitioners. The feedback collected from these sessions has been crucial in shaping the draft methodological framework of the index and the prototype maps for Uganda and Honduras, helping to refine the approach and ensure its relevance and accuracy in addressing child labour.

Between October and November 2024, FAO held the second in-person consultations in Uganda and Honduras. This allowed the key national actors to share a second round of feedback on DIGICHILD’s methodological progress and the prototype maps. The feedback is currently being used to further develop and refine the index. By February 2025, the end of the pilot phase, FAO will consolidate the consultation and validation process of the DIGICHILD Initiative, discussing pathways for integrating the new tool in the pilot countries. 

Digital tools like the DIGICHILD offer a transformative opportunity to reach vulnerable farmers and their families in remote rural areas. By generating accurate, cost and time-effective child labour risk estimations, the DIGICHILD index will strengthen our capacity to target higher-risk areas and adopt tailored action. Beyond the pilot phase, FAO’s vision is to upscale the adaptation of this global GIS-based tools to support countries in realizing a breakthrough in child labour elimination in agrifood systems and strengthen due diligence compliance along their agrifood value chains.