According to the UN, over 160 million children – some as young as five – are actively engaged in child labour globally.
It might be a bleak figure but it’s a growing reality for many children. Across complex company supply chains, children might be seen working in cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or harvesting coffee beans in Vietnam. But it’s closer to home than you might think.
“I can categorically guarantee that a child has been involved in horrific child labour in most of the things that we use in our daily lives. That is a hard thing to get our heads around,” Eleanor Harry, founder of HACE, tells Prolific North.
“It’s a hard thing to emotionally understand. When we see child labour, there’s a barrier as we think it’s an ‘us’ and ‘them’ problem. In high income countries, they think it’s a low income country problem. It’s not. There’s increasingly hundreds of thousands of children working in the US and in lots of high income countries.
“It’s an upward trajectory, I’ve seen the early data and it’s going to increase even more,” she explains.
Launching Manchester-based start-up HACE in 2020, Harry is on a mission to help companies tackle child labour using data and AI. But she first discovered the scale of the issue, and how tech could be used as a solution, after spending time in the world of fashion.
Heading south to study at the London College of Fashion more than 10 years ago, issues such as sustainability, recycling, corporate social responsibility and child labour were “never spoken about in 2010 – ever,” she recalls. “No one even recycled then!”
During her studies, she began working at an NGO. Heartbreaking scenes of seeing trafficked children working in West Africa’s fishing industry and child labourers working in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry had a lasting impact on Harry.
“Some of the worst things I’ve ever seen have been there,” she reflects. Working in Bangladash at the time of the Rana Plaza factory collapse in 2013 – where 1,500 women and children were killed – it was a “huge pivotal point” where it finally sparked conversations about child labour in fashion. She’s keen to point out that despite public perception, it’s not the biggest industry grappling with child labour issues.
“We still associate child labour with fashion but 70% of child labour is in agriculture. It’s not in a factory in South Asia, the biggest proportion is in Sub Saharan Africa.
“It’s a big problem affecting one in 10 children globally. Without that visibility into the supply chain or subsequent accountability, child labour just increases. It drives me mad how it’s so unknown as a problem.”
