Their place is in school and not in the factories. Still, millions of children work, many in hazardous conditions, to support their families.

A low-cost insurance innovation for the very low-income households in Hyderabad, Sindh, has been successful in limiting child labour. TheNational Rural Support Program (NRSP), Pakistan’s premier poverty alleviation agency, which focuses on rural development, devised innovative insurance regimes for those who borrowed from the NRSP’s microfinance schemes.

The results of a carefully designed experiment, which appeared in theJournal of Health Economics, revealed that households with the enhanced insurance reported lesser incidence of child labour than the rest.*

Pakistan gained notoriety for child labour with the unfortunate death of Iqbal Masih, a teenage boy who was shot dead in 1997. While he died in mysterious circumstances, there was nothing mysterious about him being a child labourer. His death led to a boycott of Pakistani-made carpets, which many believed employed child labour.