The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates there are 120 million children engaged in work in the developing world. This is an alarming statistic. Not only is child labour, arguably, an infringement of the basic rights of the child, it is also potentially damaging to educational, physiological and psychological development. A first reaction might be to support a legal ban on child work. More considered opinion suggests that a legal ban is likely to have limited effectiveness given the difficulty of regulating the informal labour markets in which many children work and, furthermore, if a ban were effective, it might not be in the bests interests of children from poor families reliant upon their children’s productive contribution to maintain a subsistence existence. Recent international activity has focussed on efforts to prevent the most harmful forms of child labour. ILO Convention 182 calls for the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour which, besides the involvement of children in slavery, prostitution, pornography and drug trafficking, includes work that is likely to jeopardise the health, safety or morals of young persons. Children engaged in work are exposed to a variety of hazards (e.g. dangerous machinery, falling objects, pesticides, chemicals, abusive employers) that have the potential to seriously damage their health. In addition to such health risks, the shear exhaustion induced by physical labour can be expected to place stress on the body and provoke illness. More than two-thirds of programmes undertaken as part of the ILO International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (ILO-IPEC) are directed at hazardous work or hazardous working conditions.