Tackling Child Labor: A Guide for Financial Institutions

This joint publication by Shift, The Centre for Child Rights and Business (The Centre), and UNICEF captures some of the key take-aways from a peer-learning session of Shift's Financial Institutions Practitioners Circle (‘FIs Circle’) on the topic of child labour. Drawing on the experience of the three organisations working with real-economy companies and financial institutions, this resource highlights ways for banks to more strategically evaluate and improve portfolio company capacity to address child labour. It explains salient child rights risks for banks and financial institutions and explores three ways in which they can strengthen current approaches to addressing child labour risk in line with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights: improving screening for indicators of child labour risk, improving engagement with portfolio companies on action on child labour, and participating in multi-stakeholder initiatives that include action on child labour.