How AI and Electric Vehicles Are Fuelling Child Labour
Author: Abel Varghese
We celebrate the rise of artificial intelligence and the shift to electric vehicles as twin pillars of a cleaner, smarter future. But behind every server rack and every EV battery lies a supply chain that stretches deep into some of the world's poorest communities — and in too many cases, into the lives of children who should be in school.
What is child labour?
UNICEF defines child labour as work that children are too young to perform, or that by its nature or circumstances can be hazardous, work that causes harm to a child's health, safety, or moral development. It is not a single, simple phenomenon. It spans agriculture, domestic work, manufacturing, and street trading. The UNICEF Global Report 2024 found that agriculture accounts for roughly 61% of all child labour worldwide, while ILO data highlights that more than two-thirds of child domestic workers are girls, hidden within households and highly vulnerable to exploitation and abuse (UNICEF and ILO).
How AI data centres drive demand
AI has been the fastest-growing technology sector in recent memory, with billions of dollars poured into data centre expansion. But every data centre requires enormous quantities of physical hardware like GPUs, CPUs, RAM, and storage systems: and all that hardware depends on raw materials extracted from the earth. The most critical of those materials are typically mined in low-income countries with weak regulatory frameworks: cobalt, gold, silicon, and mica. When global demand surges, so does the pressure on these supply chains, and with it, the risk that labour protections are ignored.
Cobalt: the raw material at the heart of the problem
Cobalt is perhaps the single most consequential material in this story. It is used in lithium-ion batteries: both the backup power systems that keep AI data centres running and the batteries that power electric vehicles. Roughly 70% of the world's cobalt is produced in the Democratic Republic of Congo, making the entire global technology and automotive sector dependent on a single, fragile supply. Labour surveys carried out in the DRC found that 36.8% of respondents met criteria for forced labour and 9.2% met criteria for child labour, with an average daily income of just $3.28 and working days of around nine and a half hours. Female workers received barely half the wages of their male counterparts. These are not abstract statistics, they represent people, including children, working in hazardous conditions with almost no legal protection (Blood Batteries Report). Compounding the problem is the fact that it is extremely difficult for cobalt purchasers to trace their supply chains, making child labour hard to detect and even harder to eliminate.
Electric vehicles: a green future with a dark shadow
The push towards electric vehicles is driven by genuine environmental necessity. In 2024, global demand for EV batteries reached 894 GWh: growth of more than 27% on the previous year in the US and EU, and 35% in China alone (Blood Batteries Report). That extraordinary growth translates directly into greater cobalt demand, flowing back into the same mining communities in the DRC. The electric vehicle revolution, so often framed purely as an environmental win, carries a social cost that rarely enters the public conversation.
What can be done?
None of this means we should abandon AI or electric vehicles. But progress that ignores its human consequences is not truly progress. Companies must invest in supply chain audits and hold suppliers to enforceable labour standards. Research into cobalt-free battery chemistries should be accelerated to reduce dependency on high-risk mining regions. Investment in worker welfare and fair wages in the DRC must become a condition of doing business, not an afterthought. And binding international regulations requiring human rights due diligence throughout supply chains need to be enacted and enforced.
The technology sector likes to talk about building the future. But the future it is building runs on cobalt mined by some of the world's poorest workers: including children. Acknowledging that is the first step towards changing it.
Sources used:
Understanding the different types of child labour and their impact - CRY
https://www.unicef.org/drcongo/en/what-we-do/child-protection
What is child labour? | UNICEF