The U.N. Special Envoy, Gordon Brown, has released a very powerful short video on the issue of child labor–often forced labor–and its devastating impact on the children, their future, and the future of their nations. It accompanies a report, entitled “Child Labor & Educational Disadvantage – Breaking the Link, Building Opportunity.” The report states that there are “215 million children aged 5-17 years old involved in child labor. Over half of these children are under the age of 15. Some 91 million are under 12.”

The link to out-of-school children is obvious, Brown says. “Some 15 million children of around primary school age are working rather than attending school. That figure represents fully one-quarter of all out of school children,” the report says. For our partner organizations in the Global Partnership for Education which are struggling to help those 61 million children get in school, Brown says we should recognize that freeing children from such labor is a key goal for meeting the Millennium Development Goals related to universal access to education. “An obvious conclusion to be drawn is that the international development target of achieving universal primary education by 2015 will not be achieved without a concerted global drive to eradicate child labor. ”

For more information, visit http://educationenvoy.org/