Is Childhood Universal?

The adoption of the United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was a major step for the practice of International Development worldwide. In addition to legitimising the benevolent nature of the UN, the Declaration established a precedent for understanding the human condition as a universal experience. Through the Declaration, all people were declared ‘free and equal in rights’ despite geographical, cultural, or socio-political differences that influenced the unequal distribution or diverse understandings of human rights.[1] The UN’s concept of universalism became a tool for enforcing how human life should be as opposed to acknowledging how it is, thus failing to address diverse human needs. This further entrenched a hierarchy that favoured western perceptions of an ideal life—a postulation that went on to inform the practices of many disciplines and professions. From medicine and anthropology to multinational corporations and development studies, universalism has influenced the ‘right’ way to cure, reconstruct, commercialise, and order different societies. Moreover, as the UN’s western concept of humanity gained international traction, human rights became more universal and less transcultural.[2] This resulted in confining not only the rights of adults within a western perspective, but also those of children, and the concept of childhood itself.

The 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as any human being below the age of 18 and affirms that children should be afforded their own rights ‘by reason of [their] physical and mental immaturity’.[3] This western view categorises childhood as a stage of vulnerability and innocence that makes children averse to the physical or financial responsibilities of an adult. The Convention’s universalist perspective acknowledges childhood as a ‘coherent group, or a state defined by identical needs and desires, regardless of class, racial or ethnic differences’.[4] This categorisation enables the concept of ‘global childhood’, where children are removed from their socio-political contexts and grouped within a universalist belief in childhood. The ideology of global childhood, however, misrepresents the reality that childhood is experienced differently in different spaces, such that no one ideology of childhood can account for all children’s experiences.

The concept of global childhood is heavily contested on various grounds, including the child labour discourse and the extent to which children should be allowed to work given their presumed innocence. These discussions often highlight the should versus is dilemma, where it is argued that a child should stay out of the labour force without addressing why a child is in need of or desires the labour force. In this paper, I will examine the impact of universalism as it relates to global childhood and assess how these perspectives transform the practices and beliefs of child labour. I argue that it is not possible to speak of global childhood because its universal perspective misrepresents the needs of children around the world. Furthermore, I argue that in trying to assert the existence of a global childhood, one puts oneself in a position to mould and manipulate the concept of childhood for their own, as opposed to the child’s, benefit. I begin by assessing the concept of global childhood, its historical legacy, contemporary understandings, and the consequences of its prevalence. I then analyse how child labour laws and practices have been impacted by the global childhood ideology and how this affects the children and nations involved. Finally, I use UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited policy as a case study to show how dominating the universal definition of childhood makes it possible to manipulate the labour market in favour of international organisations, businesses, and governments.

From Barbarism to Globalisation

The concept of global childhood is an amalgamation of various characteristics, including immaturity, vulnerability, and innocence, that encapsulates a western, idealised version of a child. These characteristics, however, are neither ahistorical nor apolitical. For centuries, childhood has been weaponised against colonised, racialised, and ethnic ‘others’ who are deemed inferior in the eyes of the western overseer. In this section, I analyse both the historic and contemporary uses of global childhood to discern how the imposition of western notions of childhood misrepresents and delegitimises non-western livelihoods.

Since the inception of European colonialism, the characterisation of indigenous groups as ‘childlike’ beings was essential for intervention and domination. From Rudyard Kipling’s description of the colonised as ‘half-devil, half-children’[5] to Cecil Rhodes asserting that the ‘native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise’,[6] childhood has assigned a negative stereotype onto the non-west. To be childlike was to be degenerative and thus it became justified for paternalistic Europeans to intervene in foreign worlds. The colonies were imagined to be at an earlier stage of European civilisation, or even the ‘childhood of Europe itself’, which the colonial administration used to validate the governance, discipline, and control of the natives.[7] As a result, the trope of childlike behaviour, or being encased in perpetual childhood, became a way to reframe violence ‘as necessary, legitimate, and even benevolent’.[8]

The patriarchal domination imbued in European colonialism infiltrated many disciplines, one of the most influential being medicine. French doctors in the Maghreb region during the nineteenth and twentieth century, for example, routinely diagnosed colonised people with ‘mental infantilism’. Due to the authority bestowed on these medical professionals and their alleged regard as ‘pillars of science and modernity’, mental infantilism became a common diagnosis for colonised people worldwide.[9] The infantilised colonial subject, however, was not simply placed in a category of childhood that was incomparable to any other childlike behaviour. The colonised were deemed developmentally akin to white children. Here, we see the beginning stages of white children dominating the idea of childhood and becoming the yardstick against which all childhoods are measured. The difference between the colonised and white children, however, was that the white child was bound to grow and become mature, while the colonised would remain ‘stuck within a state of savagery and “mental infancy”’.[10] The western child became the ideal model for childhood, while non-western people were condemned for their stagnant development.

The children of the colonised also played an important role in the conceptualisation of childhood. Through colonial schools, missionary interventions, and a host of child ‘protection’ initiatives, colonial administrations set out to ‘save’ colonised children from their barbaric impulses.[11] By intervening at a young age, Europeans assumed the authority to define the ‘right’ childhood and curtail all the negative influences of indigeneity. The stage of childhood for the colonised child thus became of grave importance to the colonial administration; one that could either spell doom if the child maintained their indigenous beliefs or one where childhoods could be reconstructed to fit within the colonial regime. Colonial interventions within diverse childhoods established a form of epistemicide, or the ‘failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe provide meaning to their existence’.[12] By determining that there was one way to be a child and that all other childhoods were savage or underdeveloped, Europeans codified a single story of childhood which was then claimed to be universal. In so doing, they misrepresented the needs and desires of children around the world, using the imperial ideology of childhood to assert dominance over non-western people.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, international development agencies and governments started to legitimise ideas of a homogenous human experience and eventually a homogenous experience of childhood. Beginning with the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, criteria were being established to determine the rights of all human beings. The establishment of these rights, however, also enabled development agencies and governments to intervene in the ‘underdeveloped’ world as a means of securing human rights for all. Development actors such as President Truman in his 1949 inaugural address claimed that ‘for the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these [formerly colonised] people’.[13] Western countries were believed to possess the skills necessary to rectify the dysfunction of the non-west and carry on their roles as paternalistic leaders.

The passing of the Convention on the Rights of the Child brought with it its own prejudices on the ‘right’ childhood. Within the Convention, a universal / global childhood was set as the standard by which all children could live a free and just life, ‘in particular [those] in the developing countries’.[14] As Olga Nieuwenhuys argues, however, the Convention was ‘grounded in the assumption both of the superiority of the childhood model as it has evolved in the north and of the need to impose this model on a global scale’.[15] This model had reinvigorated itself through various power relations including international development and child-rights movements that prioritised western childhoods as ideal.[16] This not only flattened children’s various experiences of childhood but also excluded the majority of children from the concept of childhood.[17] Instead of acknowledging the varied understandings and experiences of a child, global childhood implied that children who did not live up to western standards were being robbed of their childhood. By promoting the western notion of childhood on a global scale, western beliefs came to ‘dominate the experience of being human’.[18]

Who is a Child Labourer?

Whether to make money for themselves or their families, children have had to adjust to the economic and social demands of a globalised world. As globalisation expanded post-World War II, it redefined childhood and brought it into the clutches of international elites. Under capitalist motivations, northern and southern elites clung to the concept of global childhood and used it to determine not only the ‘right’ way of being a child, but the ‘right’ way for a child to labour. In this section, I analyse how global childhood impacts child labour practices, and how these practices vary between different geographies and populations. I argue that this variation exposes the myth of global childhood and highlights how only certain childhoods are protected while others are subjugated to satisfy the capitalist world system.

The triumph of neoliberalism and its structural adjustment policies beginning in the 1980s brought children of the ‘developing’ world under a universalist regime. Within this regime, only one childhood mattered enough to be protected—the childhood that promoted a western, ‘autonomous, liberated consumer’. The non-consumer southern child, however, was branded as deficient and in need, which could only be rectified by becoming a ‘full participant in the new market-approach of development’.[19] As such, child labour in the Global South was heavily promoted, but participation in the market did not (and does not) guarantee the benefits it promised. Studies such as Michael Bourdillon’s 2010 documentation of working girls in Morocco highlight how international child labour policies greatly affect the consistency of work for children of the Global South.[20] In Morocco, working girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen were targeted in a Marks and Spencer (M&S) garment factory after a TV programme investigated the prevalence of child labourers in the workplace. Before the programme could air, M&S sent representatives to the factory and ensured that all workers under the age of fifteen were fired. For M&S and the TV programme, this is where the story ended, but the girls who were fired were now forced to find new work, often in less desirable sectors. Bourdillon’s study begs the question of whose interests are served. By firing the girls, M&S advanced their corporate image and profit but did nothing to ensure the well-being of the children they claimed to care so much about. What became of the children was no more important than the desire to ‘settle the British conscience’.[21] Global childhood’s claim to secure children’s well-being is, therefore, not always upheld for children in the Global South.

Globalisation is a force to which people have adapted out of necessity, taking on extra responsibilities to do so. Children in the Global South, and marginalised youth in the Global North, are among those most impacted by this adaptation as they set out to economically contribute to poverty reduction, while being simultaneously shunned by the global public for child labour. In many cases, children enjoy their work, gain social and interpersonal skills, use work to improve their lives, and gain educational experiences while working.[22] These benefits, however, are often not highlighted in mainstream child labour discourses, where child labour is instead used as a scapegoat to hide political and financial motivations.[23] As seen in the ‘raid-and-rescue’ operation in Morocco, a focus on child labour can simply be a means for raiding and rescuing a company’s reputation. This then puts children of the Global South at risk of unjust termination, without safeguarding their rights promised by global childhood.

In addition to inciting the need for children to work, globalisation also determines the extent to which certain children can work. Beginning in the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution’s Romantic Movement declared that western children were no longer fit to work in factories for fear of ‘corrupting the natural innocence of children and destroying their potential for moral and intellectual development’.[24] This, coupled with the fact that children’s inconsistent work patterns were economically burdensome to employers, set a precedent for condemning child labour for those in the north. During the same period, however, children in the colonies were exploited and their labour was not banned by any authority, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in their 1919 Convention on Child Rights. Instead, child colonial labour was endorsed and disguised by claiming that the children were under apprenticeships, that they were attending school during their downtime, or that they were simply helping their mothers with menial tasks. In some cases, colonial administrations argued that the colonised child matured faster, meaning that the working age could be lowered.[25] These framings enabled childhood to only be seen as innocent in the north and among specific racial and ethnic distinctions. This persists today as black and brown children are overly criminalised, expected to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and work towards a better life, due to the belief that they are not really children.[26] 

Political and financial investments in child labour by ruling elites in the north and south further distinguish between children who are protected and those who are exploited. For southern countries, publicly adhering to child labour movements through NGOs and aid can provide significant financial advantages. On the other hand, if southern governments lower their labour standards and conceal the existence of child labour, they gain a competitive advantage in the global market. This is often referred to as the race to the bottom, where countries lower their labour standards to attract foreign investment, incentivising other countries to do the same.[27] This competition can promote abusive labour standards for children in the Global South and marginalised communities in the Global North, while elite children are largely unaffected.

Though southern countries are often shamed by their northern counterparts for their participation in child labour, it is no secret that northern countries participate in exploitative labour practices and turn a blind eye if the child labour in question benefits their bottom line.[28] Child labour is a tool through which countries can assert their moral or financial dominance. This then makes it dangerous and misleading to assume that child labour campaigns, established through the standards of global childhood, should be taken at face value. The decision to universalise or homogenise any diverse population is rarely done for that population’s benefit. Instead, the population is made more governable, manageable, and easier to dominate in the elite’s favour. In the next section, I examine this domination in UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited policy, in order to discern how international organisations use global childhood campaigns to carve out a ‘new field of consumer childhoods’.[29]

Generation Unlimited

Global childhood and child labour go hand in hand to determine what practices are suitable for a child. For decades, mainstream development discourses have championed the abolishment of child labour, premised on the belief that such labour ‘deprives children of their childhood […] [or] deprives them of the opportunity to attend school’.[30] In recent years, however, the tides have seemingly started to change as more and more development agencies call for an increase in youth employment. This change is evident in UNICEF’s Generation Unlimited, where the focus on youth labour practices, skills, and education has been rebranded to mark exciting possibilities in a globalised future. In this section, I analyse this rebranding to discern how concepts of global childhood and child labour are not universally applied and can be manipulated by development authorities (ie wealthy governments, development agencies, and multinational corporations) to further their economic interests. I argue that, by appealing to global childhood, children are put at greater risk of being exploited in the global market and are further bound to labour practices that reflect the needs of development authorities, as opposed to the needs of children.

In 2018, UNICEF’s global youth agenda, Generation Unlimited (GenU), was launched at the United Nations General Assembly. In response to the ‘demographic boom happening across much of the world’, UNICEF proposed GenU as an opportunity to ‘raise global productivity’[31] and counter ‘labour underutilization’.[32] As a global multi-sector partnership, GenU is committed to ‘preparing young people [aged 10-24] for the world of work’ by investing in education, training, and employment opportunities.[33] Through its partnership with the ILO, UNICEF finds that the labour participation rate of young people in the Global South has decreased, and though this reflects that as more children are in secondary and tertiary education, fewer young people are employed. UNICEF and the ILO argue that young people who are not currently employed reflect the ‘potential labour force’ whose full capability ‘is not being realized’.[34] To combat this, GenU targets young people in the Global South to boost their development prospects. By overhauling education systems that are fragmented and outdated to offering employment opportunities to youth,[35] GenU aims to ‘support every young person to thrive in the world of work’.[36]

At the outset, GenU’s target of young people aged 10-24 offers some questionable notions of work. First, there is the belief that new forms of child labour should now be desired and reconceptualised as exciting opportunities for the youth. Then there is the focus on children of the Global South who are expected to carry the burden of raising global productivity as opposed to attending school. How does this rebranding of child labour affect southern children, and who is GenU truly likely to benefit?

GenU identifies itself as a ‘coalition of leaders coming together for young people’, with established partnerships in the private sector, governments, UN agencies, financing institutions, and civil society organisations. These partnerships lay the groundwork and financial backing for GenU’s initiatives, and by March 2019 projects had commenced in Bangladesh, India, and Kenya.[37] In each of these areas, the focus was placed on creating jobs for young people through apprenticeships, establishing stronger links between the education system and employers, and facilitating skills training to prepare young people for the future of work. By April 2019, GenU entered into a formidable partnership with the World Bank, where the Bank pledged $1billion ‘for boosting job prospects for young people’.[38] This was later followed by the creation of the Young People’s Action Team (YPAT) in August, a group of eight young people (UN-appointed activists and entrepreneurs from the Global South) with whom GenU would interact to ‘ensure meaningful engagement of young people’ throughout the agenda’s implementation.

Though premised on providing the best outcome for young people, GenU created the YPAT nearly a year after its launch. As such, young people were not present in the discussions that would determine and transform the necessity of their work. If neither spearheaded by young people themselves nor discussed with them to determine the new importance of their labour, why had GenU brought the idea of working young people in the Global South—between the ages of 10 to 24—in vogue? Moreover, who were the people responsible for redefining acceptable labour practices for children and young people? The answers are provided by GenU’s governance, headed by its eleven board members. Of these eleven, seven are CEOs or Vice Presidents of some of the world’s largest private sector companies, including Microsoft, Unilever, IKEA, and PwC. The remaining four head some of the largest financial institutions such as the World Bank and Dubai Cares. The GenU board is thus dominated by economically driven institutions that have a vested interest in the future of the labour force. This interest, and their position as board members, enable development authorities to redefine the value of child labour in the Global South in favour of their economic interests, regardless of the impact it may have on children’s wellbeing.

By dominating the definition of global childhood and child labour, development authorities can manipulate these concepts in their favour. Within the Global South, GenU has enabled this manipulation by making the problem of child labour the inevitable solution. As GenU identifies ‘key gaps and opportunities for investment’ in the Global South, they do so by targeting children as an untapped labour market that foreign companies can incorporate into their business, often for a cheaper wage.[39] If the southern child was previously suffering from child labour, development authorities can argue that it was due to their exploitive work conditions in the informal sector. The formal employment opportunities available through multinationals, however, are claimed to offer southern children better opportunities for themselves and the world market. This taps into the underutilised labour potential of the Global South and makes child labour the new shining star of development. Ultimately, the dichotomy between white and colonised children is reinforced; the former are allowed to embody the innocence of global childhood, while the latter bear the burden of uplifting the global economy. Under GenU, development authorities rally funds, establish businesses, and secure contracts, creating a new business model around the southern child’s labour, one in which their well-being is no longer of much concern.

Once the narrative has shifted from anti-child labour to pro-youth employment opportunities, it becomes acceptable to establish education and training companies in the Global South that are dedicated to putting children to work. Microsoft, for example, partnered with GenU to create Passport for Earning, a remote learning platform that provides free certified education and skills training to users around the world. Likewise, Dubai Cares invested $2.5 million in Giga, an initiative to connect every school to the internet. Further investigation, however, finds that the flow of funds has gone less to the children concerned and more to the businesses involved. Microsoft’s Passport for Earning, for example, is not a new programme, but an extension of a previous UNICEF and Microsoft collaboration, the Learning Passport.[40] As such, the multi-billion-dollar company, Microsoft, is awarded a contract through GenU funding to further invest in their previously established Passport project. Likewise, Dubai Cares’ investment in Giga was an investment in UNICEF’s previously established partnership with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).[41] Together, UNICEF and the ITU created Giga as a flagship global youth initiative which was now being brought under the umbrella of GenU and funded with millions of dollars. The internal flow of funds between big businesses and development agencies highlights the profit to be made from promoting youth employment in the Global South.

Outside of UNICEF, many arguments have been made in favour of creating more work opportunities for youth and shifting from degree to skills accumulation.[42] Since the 1990s, business and political elites have championed deschooling and anti-college initiatives that expedite youth into the labour force through alternative certifications. Deschooling initiatives—mostly targeting marginalised youth in the Global North—support a ‘neoliberal, privatised and marketised model of education policy reform, in which the core purpose of education is narrowed to serving the needs of the marketplace’.[43] Instead of university degrees, businesses and governments support the accumulation of fast-track, skills-based certificates or enrolment in apprenticeship programmes. Though these measures claim to benefit the economic futures of all people, deschooling initiatives often target low-income and marginalised students to expand a nation’s labour potential. Through strategic closures of schools in low-income areas and the promotion of alternative certification for entry-level, low-paying jobs, neoliberal deschooling advocates exclude marginalised groups from valuable education and work opportunities. Marginalised youth are thus expected to rapidly join the labour force and forgo the protections promised by global childhood.

GenU piggybacks on the neoliberal ideals of deschooling by rapidly bringing marginalised youth into the global labour force. Moreover, GenU generates profit for businesses that provide education, training, and employment opportunities in line with their youth initiative. By speaking of global childhood, GenU claims to know what labour practices are best suited for a child, when in reality it misrepresents children’s desire to work while trying to meet the needs of the global market. Moreover, it and its partner organisations manipulate the idealised image of childhood to bolster their financial interests. GenU should not, therefore, speak of global childhood because their treatment and expectation of children vary across geographical contexts.

Conclusion 

Global childhood is a universalist concept that unjustly privileges western ideals of childhood and misrepresents the diverse experiences of children around the world. As a result, global childhood can be used to determine the ‘right’ practices for a child to value, particularly the value of their labour. The universal authority imbued in the notion of global childhood impacts how child labour can be manipulated to benefit the needs of development authorities and cause greater harm to children. It is thus important to democratise the idea of childhood so that no elite group can proclaim any overarching decisions on what is best for all children. Likewise, children must be more involved in the decision-making processes that affect their livelihoods. Only then can a truly comprehensive and inclusive understanding of childhood be used to safeguard children’s well-being across the world.

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Donari Yahzid

Donari Yahzid is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and MPhil in Development Studies Graduate (Cambridge), through which she began her work on researching Indigenous land rights movements throughout the globe. Now as a PhD candidate, and in addition to working as an editor for the CJLPA, Donari researches land rights for Quilombo and favela communities in Brazil. 

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[1] Universal Declaration of Human Rights [UDHR] (1948) art I.

[2] See Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (Zed Books 2019).

[3] Convention on the Rights of the Child [UNCRC] (1989) Preamble, here quoting the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959).

[4] Jude L Fernando, ‘Children’s Rights: Beyond the Impasse’ (2001) 575(1) The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18.

[5] Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man’s Burden’ (1899) 12(4) McClure’s Magazine 290-1.

[6] Quoted in Ashis Nandy, ‘Reconstructing childhood: A critique of the ideology of adulthood’ (1984) 10(3)

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 361.

[7] Joseph A Massad, Desiring Arabs (The University of Chicago Press 2007) 55.

[8] China Mills and Brenda N Lefrançois, ‘Child as Metaphor: Colonialism, Psy-Governance, and Epistemicide’ (2018) 74(7-8) The Journal of New Paradigm Research 508.

[9] Nina S Studer, ‘The Infantilization of the Colonized: Medical and Psychiatric Descriptions of Drinking Habits in the Colonial Maghreb’ in Rachid Ouaissa, Friederike Pannewick, and Alena Strohmaier (eds), Re-Configurations: Contextualising Transformation Processes and Lasting Crises in the Middle East and North Africa (Springer VS 2021) 135.

[10] Mills and Lefrançois (n 8) 508.

[11] See Sherene Razack, Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody (University of Toronto Press 2015); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, ‘Settler Colonialism as a Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation’ (2015) 1(1) Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 54-74.

[12] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (Paradigm 2014) 111.

[13] Harry Truman, ‘Inaugural Address’ (1949) <https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/19/inaugural-address> accessed 31 July 2025.

[14] UNCRC (n 3) Preamble.

[15] Olga Nieuwenhuys, ‘Global Childhood and the Politics of Contempt’ (1998) 23(3) Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 270.

[16] See Tatek Abebe, ‘“Global/local” research on children and childhood in a “global society”’ (2018) 25(3) Childhood 272-96.

[17] See Tatek Abebe and Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, ‘Beyond pluralizing African childhoods: Introduction’ (2016) 23(3) Childhood 303-16.

[18] ‘Editorial: The Globalization of Childhood or Childhood as a Global Issue’ (1996) 3 Childhood 307.

[19] Olga Nieuwenhuys, ‘Embedding the Global Womb: Global Child Labour and the New Policy Agenda’ (2007) 5(1-2) Children & Geographies 150.

[20] See Michael Bourdillon et al, Rights and Wrongs of Children’s Work (Rutgers University Press 2010).

[21] ibid 8.

[22] See Dena Aufseeser et al, ‘Children’s work and children’s well-being: Implications for policy’ (2016) 36(2) Dev Policy Rev 241-61.

[23] See Stuart Aitken et al, ‘Reproducing Life and Labor: Global processes and working children in Tijuana, Mexico’ (2006) 13(3) Childhood 365-87.

[24] Bourdillon et al (n 20) 10.

[25] See Nieuwenhuys (n 19).

[26] See Phillip Atiba Goff et al, ‘The essence of innocence: consequences of dehumanizing Black children’ (2014) 106(4) 526-45.

[27] See William W Onley, ‘A race to the bottom? Employment protection and foreign direct investment’ (2013) 91(2) Journal of International Economics 191-203.

[28] See Ralitza Dimova, ‘The political economy of child labor’ in Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (Springer 2020) <https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/191173346/GLO_DP_0816.pdf> accessed 31 July 2025; Jagdish Bhagwati, ‘Trade liberalization and “Fair Trade” demands: Addressing the environment and labor standards issues’ (1995) 18(6) World Economy 745-59.

[29] Nieuwenhuys (n 19) 150.

[30] ILO, ‘What is Child Labour’ (ILO, 6 August 2025) <https://www.ilo.org/topics/child-labour/what-child-labour> accessed 6 August 2025.

[31] UNICEF, ‘Generation Unlimited enables young people to become productive and engaged members of society’ (Brookings, July 2019) <https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Brookings_Blum_2019_Generation_Unlimited.pdf> accessed 6 August 2025.

[32] ILO, ‘Global Employment Trends for Youth 2020: Technology and the future of jobs’ (2020) 13 <https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40dgreports/%40dcomm/%40publ/documents/publication/wcms_737648.pdf> accessed 31 July 2025.

[33] UNICEF (n 31).

[34] ILO (n 32) 13.

[35] See Urmila Sarkar, ‘Generation Unlimited: Investing for and with young people’ <https://www.unicef.org/rosa/media/5661/file/urmila-sarkar-presentation-2019.pdf.pdf> accessed 31 July 2025.

[36] ‘Generation Unlimited: Overview and Progress’ (2019) <https://www.generationunlimited.org/media/2351/file/Annual%20Report%202019.pdf> accessed 31 July 2025.

[37] Sarkar (n 35).

[38] (n 36).

[39] UNICEF, ‘Generation Unlimited Operating Model’ 7-8 <https://www.unicef.org/genunlimited/media/1121/file/Operating%20Model.pdf> accessed 31 July 2025.

[40] See Anupama Saikia, 2021. ‘Accenture, Dubai Cares, Microsoft and UNICEF launch digital education platform under Generation Unlimited to help address global learning crisis’ (Generation Unlimited, 12 December 2021) <https://www.generationunlimited.org/press-releases/passport-to-earning> accessed 31 July 2025.

[41] ‘UNICEF and Dubai Cares announce partnership through Generation Unlimited to scale Digital Connectivity’ (Giga Global, 17 December 2020) <https://giga.global/unicef-and-dubai-cares-announce-partnership-through-generation-unlimited-to-scale-digital-connectivity/> accessed 31 July 2025.

[42] See Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education (Princeton University Press 2018); Robert Halfon, ‘Why the obsession with academic degrees in this country must end’ (New Statesman, 4 March 2018) <https://www.newstatesman.com/spotlight/2018/03/why-obsession-academic-degrees-country-must-end> accessed 31 July 2025.

[43] Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock, ‘Deschooling from Above’ (2020) 61(4) Race & Class 68.