Abstract
The issue of child labor is worldwide and poses an unprecedented threat to children's social and mental development, reduces their ability to enjoy childhood, and limits educational opportunities. With no remedy at hand, governments turned towards containment and mitigation strategies to mitigate the number of cases of child labor. This study aims to evaluate the national-level initiatives implemented by the Philippine government through a trend analysis of child labor cases from 2006 to 2018. This study adopted a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, utilizing open-source data from the Philippine Statistics Authority and government agencies. Quantitative analysis involved trend and moving average techniques to assess child labor statistics from 2006 to 2018, while qualitative analysis examined 24 national initiatives through content analysis and system synthesis to evaluate government responses. The trend analysis of child labor cases generates only downtrends, indicating that the governments' initiatives significantly affect child labor cases. Upon analyzing the relevance of initiatives to the number of cases, the Convention on the Rights of a Child, strengthening initiatives, and workshops cover the majority of interventions released to combat child labor. These initiatives led to a downtrend in child labor cases.
