This World Day to End Child Labour is a poignant one for me. It’s been over three years since I started living as a more conscious consumer, by educating myself about child labour in the products I buy and use. That all started with a little blue dress I bought in England.

In February, UN agencies declared a famine in parts of South Sudan. They estimated that 100,000 people faced immediate threat of starvation. They also raised a serious alarm that other regions in Africa are at risk of famine.

Meet Melvin. He’s only 11, but he says he can’t remember the last time he played as a child. As a worker on a coffee farm, Melvin let go of childhood a long time ago.

In many urban areas of India, families live in old, one-room houses. The houses do not have toilets, so everyone is forced to rely on public toilets that are shared by several families. The lack of dignity makes using these facilities a harrowing experience for young women.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m in love; even though I’ve been playing for nearly two decades, soccer and I are still in the honeymoon phase. Sure, like every relationship, we’ve had our ups and downs. But there is something magical about soccer that brings people together. That’s what I can’t get enough of.

World Vision answers your frequently asked questions about Child Friendly Spaces.

Young Sonia works long hours every day, hoping to make enough money for a few vegetables. She’s homeless and sleeps wherever she can, covered only in a thin sheet. Recently, she’s been unable to see at night – a symptom of malnutrition – and fears going blind altogether. Not to mention all the other reasons a girl on her own has to be afraid of.

Srey Neang packs 4000 heavy bricks onto a truck every single day. It’s backbreaking labour, work not meant for a 13-year-old girl. In fact, she spends more time working than she does in school, making her dream of becoming a teacher seem like an unlikely reality. 

In 2013, the Rana Plaza garment factory collapsed in Bangladesh, killing more than 1,100 people. Many workers had received an ultimatum that day after complaining about dangerous cracks in the structure: go to work now or lose your pay. In the days that followed, Canadians watched in horror as information was released linking some of their favourite clothing brands with garments being sewn in that very building.

Children should be playing, learning to read and write and experiencing happy, healthy childhoods. But when there’s not enough money to put a meal on the table, children have no choice but to earn their keep. It’s a growing problem, particularly in countries that don’t have strong governments, laws and regulations to make sure children are going to school, not down mine shafts.

They may not share the same views when it comes to politics, but on the issue of child slavery, these five Canadian MPs all agree: it needs to stop. Wayne Easter, Russ Hiebert, Dean Allison, Wai Young and Isabelle Morin, took to the bustling streets of Phnom Penh and Bangkok, where they met slavery’s youngest victims.

Fourteen-year-old Haitian Sonite Edmond despondently recalls being forced to work as a restavek when she was just six years old. Meaning “to stay with” in Creole, restaveks are children working in domestic slavery, as Sonite was forced to when she went to “stay with” her godmother in Port-au-Prince.

For fifteen-year-old Mao, poverty turned an innocent sleepover at a friend’s house into a childhood trapped in Cambodia’s sex trade.