By Victor AhiumaYoung

The International Labour Organisation, ILO, has said that child labour remains one of the most pressing issues of today.

According to ILO,  child labour remains a pervasive and persistent issue, 160 million children – 63 million girls and 97 million boys—are in child labour, accounting for almost 1 in 10 of all children worldwide.

A recently completed five-year major action research project,  Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia  or CLARISSA came up with new insights on the complex underlying issues related to child labour Asia Pacific region.

The programme was implemented, with the financial support of the British Government, by a consortium from the academic world and local and international civil society and led by the Institute of Development Studies under Professor Danny Burns, the most prominent theorist and practitioner of action research worldwide.

The programme, thanks to its innovative approach of truly and meaningfully involving children and other key stakeholders, not only generated new insights but also proposed a variety of policy propositions that, if implemented, could drastically help reduce and eliminate child labour.

Among the numerous research outputs of CLARISSA, is a ground breaking research paper entitled: Drivers and Dynamics of the Worst Forms of Child Labour in Kathmandu’s Adult Entertainment Sector. The paper, targeting some of the key transit points in Kathmandu, sheds new light on the causes and dynamics behind child exploitation and sexual harassment in informal and extremely precarious jobs in an industry highly unregulated that mostly operates in a gray area between what is legit and what is not.