Opening speech for Anthony Lake, Executive Director of UNICEF
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank you all for coming today and for showing the interest about this topic. I also greatly appreciate all the people that have supported me in the time after I got promoted. I would like to tell you about child labor in poor and developing countries. There is a lot of child labor around the world. Especially in countries like the Philippines with a poor community. School is often not an option. The kids must gather money for the poor family instead. The children in these kinds of areas have no time to play and use their imagination. Their employers just set them to work with a very low salary. There are many different kinds of jobs that children are exposed to.
Like some children would receive a machete in the hand and will have to spend every day of his/hers childhood fertilizing and harvesting sugar-canes in a sugar-cane field. Or they might be exposed to prostitution, the job with one of the worst salaries. With only an age of 8 to 18 years, they would be paid with only about 1$ per trick and they would have sexual intercourse daily with strangers. In fact, more than 60.000 child labors (girls and boys) in the Philippines work as prostitutes. And we can estimate that 90 percent of child prostitutes in the Philippines have been sexually abused at home.
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