Pope Francis on Sunday offered his prayers for the people of Ethiopia’s Tigray region, hit by hunger and famine, and appealed for an end to the child labour in the world.
“I am particularly close to the people of the Tigray region of Ethiopia, which is suffering from a serious humanitarian crisis that is exposing the poorest to famine,” Francis said after his weekly Angelus prayer in St. Peter’s Square.
“Today there is famine, today there is hunger there,” he said.
Fighting since November between Ethiopia’s government and the region’s ousted ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), has displaced more than 2 million people. The conflict broke out just before the main harvest, with each side blaming the other.
More than 350,000 of Tigray’s nearly 6 million people are living in famine conditions, according to an analysis by United Nations agencies and global aid groups first reported by Reuters on Thursday (June 10), while nearly 2 million others are one step away from such dire deprivation, they said.
After the prayer, the pontiff also appealed to global leaders to put an end to child labour, a “tragedy” as the Pope said that has risen for the first time in 20 years, the United Nations said on Thursday, with one in 10 children in work worldwide and millions more at risk due to COVID-19.
“We cannot close our eyes to the exploitation of children, deprived of the right to play, to study, and to dream,” Francis told the faithful gathered in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The number of child labourers has increased to 160 million from 152 million in 2016, with the greatest rise in Africa due to population growth, crises, and poverty, said the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
The U.N. has made 2021 the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour, saying urgent action is needed to meet a goal of ending the practice by 2025 and said that child labourers may now be working longer hours or under worse conditions due to pandemic-related economic shocks and school closures, and many more may be forced into the worst forms of child labour.
The report highlighted an increase in the number of children aged 5 to 11 years in child labour, who now account for just over half of the total global figure, as well as a rise in those in hazardous work that is likely to harm their health or safety.
