During your childhood, you could have lived in the painful child labour experience.

A good number of us have seen it, be it on our streets with children hawking, the village path with little children carrying heavy Jerri cans of water, young children working in plantations for long hours to the worst forms of child labour where children are engaged in various hazardous activities like mining.

Child labour in Uganda manifests in different communities sometimes hidden underneath the pretext of preparing children for a productive adulthood.

According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), child labour is defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and dignity and is harmful to their physical or mental development.

As such, we all need to understand, appreciate and promote the concept of light work - work that is not harmful to the child’s health and development and doesn’t affect school attendance and participation.

As Uganda joined the rest of the world to commemorate World Day Against Child Labour o on June 12 under the theme: ‘Covid-19: Protect children from child labour, now more than ever!’ We all need to rally behind and protect our children.

The Covid-19 pandemic hits us at a time when Uganda has more than 2,048,000 children aged between five years and 17 years engaged in child labour (Ubos UNHS 2016/17).Additionally Uganda has the second youngest population in the world with 78 per cent being young people less than 30 years old and 49.3 per cent being children less than 15 years (Ubos 2019).

In light of this, the Covid-19 pandemic and its immense impact on health, temporary school closures, rise in adult unemployment and loss of livelihoods could exacerbate child labour numbers in Uganda and steal the promise for a better future for Ugandan children.

School closures as a result of the pandemic has affected routine learning of more than 15 million learners in Uganda.

Education remains one of the most effective ways to combat child labour, but in the current situation, several children could be at risk of child labour in various sectors like agriculture where several activities like harvesting and planting are ongoing.

The risk is further compounded by the limited access to virtual learning facilities and enabling home learning environments across the country.