An estimated 138 million children worldwide are in child labor, more than half — around 54 million — in hazardous work that directly endangers their health, safety, or development.
Where child labor happens, by sector:
- Agriculture — 61% (~84 million children). Farming, fishing, forestry, livestock herding. This includes cocoa farming and cotton picking, and is where the largest share of child labor happens within family units on small farms.
- Services — 27% (~37 million children). Domestic work in households, street vending, small-scale commerce.
- Industry — 13% (~18 million children). Mining, construction, and manufacturing — including textile and garment work.
Regionally, agriculture dominates most heavily in Sub-Saharan Africa, where roughly 7 in 10 child labor cases occur in that sector alone.
Most child labor happens within the family unit rather than through outside employers — poverty is usually the root driver, with families relying on children’s work or labor income to survive. That matters for any robotics-based solution: automation can address the work itself, but it doesn’t address the economic pressure driving families to rely on that work in the first place.
What’s actually being spent to fight it
There’s no single, authoritative figure for how much the world spends fighting child labor — funding is scattered across dozens of governments, UN agencies, and NGOs with no central tracking. What is documented: the U.S. government’s international child labor programs have run roughly $50-60 million a year for over a decade, one of the most consistently tracked single funding sources. A 2016 report from the Freedom Fund and Humanity United found $233 million in private philanthropic funding went toward combating modern slavery broadly (a wider category than child labor alone) over a three-year period — roughly $78 million a year globally. Adding in other governments and NGOs, total global spending likely reaches into the low billions annually, but no single source tracks it comprehensively.
That gap in tracking is itself telling — a problem affecting 138 million children, without a clear picture of how much the world is actually spending to address it, is not a problem being treated with the urgency its scale deserves.
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