Tag Archive for: Top 10

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10 Facts About Refugees in 2023

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June 20th is World Refugee Day. To highlight the challenges refugees face worldwide, especially issues that affect children, we have compiled a quick fact sheet to inform people on this worldwide day of recognition.

  • There are 108.4 Million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Of those, 35 Million are classified as refugees. 43 million children are among those forcibly displaced (UNHCR)
  • There are 13.7 million child refugees and asylum-seekers worldwide as of 2022 (UNICEF)
  • The highest number of refugees come from Syria (6.8m), Ukraine (5.7m), and Afghanistan (5.7m). These 3 countries account for around half of the world’s refugees. (UNHCR)
  • The countries that host the most refugees are Turkey (3.6m), Iran (3.4m), Colombia (2.5m) Germany (2.1m), Pakistan (1.7m). Those 5 countries account for 38% of hosted refugees. 76% of refugees are hosted in low/middle income countries. Least developed countries hold around 20% of the total. (UNHCR)
  • Child marriage is pervasive among Syrian Refugees. Among 1,593 female adolescents surveyed in Lebanon, 32.56% were married before the age of 17. Common among these children was also a lack of sexual health knowledge and high rates of early childbearing. (NIH)
  • In 2021, 114k people attempted to reach Europe by sea, with 3,200 of them dying or going missing. (UNHCR) There have been more than 20,000 migrant and refugee deaths recorded in the central Mediterranean since 2014. (Reuters)
  • Over 400 migrants have already died in 2023 crossing the Mediterranean, and this is as of Apr 12, 2023 and before the catastrophe in Greece that has possibly resulted in the deaths of 600 more migrants. That makes it the most fatalities in the past six years over a three-month period according to the United Nations. (Reuters)
  • Syrian Refugees are often placed in child labor conditions, with 3/4th of Lebanon’s 130k child laborers being Syrian Refugees. (University of Texas Law)
  • There were 130,000 unaccompanied minors that entered the United States last year, many of them having been displaced. (New York Times)
  • 48% of refugee children remain out of school. Young refugees are 30% less likely to complete primary school and 50% less likely to complete secondary school. (UNHCR)
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Child Labor Coalition Announces Top 10 Child Labor Stories of 2011

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List Points to Some of 2012’s Child Labor Priorities

Washington, DC—Advocates from the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), a group representing more than two dozen organizations concerned with protecting working youth, has released a list of the top ten child labor stories from 2011. The list represents international and American issues in child labor that received considerable attention in 2011 and what advocates hope is an increase in attention to exploitation faced by vulnerable child workers that has previously gone unnoticed by mainstream media.

“The year brought some much needed attention to serious child labor problems in the supply chains of some of the world’s largest companies,” said Reid Maki, Coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition and the Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards for the National Consumers League (NCL). “However, we also saw a disturbing move in a few states to roll back long-standing child labor protections and a much-publicized attack on child labor laws by a presidential candidate.

The year’s 10 biggest stories, according to the CLC, included (in no particular order):

Apple acknowledges that child labor contributed to the making of iPhones and other electronic gadgets in its Chinese factories. In February, Apple announced that it had found 91 children worked at its suppliers in 2010—a nine-fold increase from the previous year. The company also acknowledged that 137 workers had been poisoned by the chemical, n-hexane, at a supplier’s manufacturing facility and that less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with Apple’s code on working hours. In the year prior to December 2010, Apple had sales of over $65 billion.

Victoria’s hidden “secret”: children help harvest the cotton that goes into garments. Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed in December that some of the cotton retail giant Victoria’s Secret uses is harvested by young children in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. The piece profiled 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire, who works on a cotton farm, where she said she is routinely beaten by the owner. By hand, Clarisse performs work that many farmers use a plow and oxen to perform and often works in 100-plus degree heat and eats just one meal a day. Some days she gets no food. Many of the children like Clarisse are considered “foster children” and receive no wages— most do not attend school. Limited Brand, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, has annual sales in excess of $5 billion.

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