What the record shows when its sources are joined

Each analysis joins published sources Mtoto reads, states its claim, shows how it was computed and what it does not show.

Where one large funder’s child-labour money goes, against where child labour is
Of the 20 countries with the highest share of children in child labour, 12 are named in none of the 91 child-labour projects ILAB ran from 2018 onward, as its own project pages listed them in 2025.
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The measurement gap
Of the 17 countries where 20% or more of children are in child labour, 10 are known only from a survey five or more years old.
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Law against practice
Of the 17 countries where 20% or more of children are in child labour, 16 have ratified both ILO conventions on child labour (C138 and C182).
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Inspectors, and what inspection finds
In 20 of the 28 countries for which ILAB prints both numbers, the labour inspectorate has fewer than half the inspectors ILAB says it needs.
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Exports exposed
Goods the US Department of Labor lists as produced with child labour in a country, as a share of that country’s exports.
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Cocoa: two readings that do not meet
The household survey and the industry’s monitoring systems give very different readings of child labour in West African cocoa.
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Asked and enacted: the US budget for ILAB
Each year, what the US administration asked Congress for ILAB, and what Congress enacted. In FY2019–FY2021 the request would have ended new grants; Congress kept them.
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