This is the News in Brief from the United Nations.

One in every 10 children worldwide works instead of going to school: ILO

Around the world, some 160 million children work to earn a living, instead of going to school. That’s almost one in every 10 children.

On Monday’s World Day against Child Labour, the International Labour Organization (ILO) shared these staggering numbers as a reminder of the urgency to end this practice.

ILO’s Director-General Gilbert Houngbo, said that for the first time in 20 years, child labour is on the rise.

“Child labour rarely happens because parents are bad, or do not care. Rather, it springs from a lack of social justice,” he said.

Mr. Houngbo stressed that tackling the root causes of child labour requires creating decent work opportunities for adults, so that they can provide for their families,

ending forced labour, creating safe and healthy workplaces, letting workers organize and make their voices heard, as well as ending discrimination, since child labour often affects the most marginalized.

Ukraine: Kakhovka dam aid effort reaches 180,000 people

Heavy rains and thunderstorms in the area of the Kakhovka dam disaster in southern Ukraine are aggravating the humanitarian situation there and making evacuations and aid distribution harder.

That’s the latest from the UN’s aid coordination office (OCHA), which tweeted on Monday that the UN and its humanitarian partners have delivered vital supplies, mainly water, hygiene items and food, to cover the needs of nearly 180,000 people, despite the difficult conditions.

The number of people reached with aid is up five-fold since 9 June.

“Drinking water continues to be an issue”, and long-term solutions are needed immediately, the UN’s top official in the country, Denise Brown, said on Sunday, speaking from an evacuation point in Kherson city.

Meanwhile, the UN’s nuclear safety watchdog, IAEA, has stressed the need to “clarify the reason for a significant discrepancy” between different measurements of the height of the reservoir whose water cools the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant occupied by Russia.

The level has been “dropping rapidly” since the Kakhovka dam, situated not far downstream from the power plant, was destroyed.

United States decides to rejoin UN cultural agency

The head of the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO, announced on Monday that the United States has decided to rejoin the organization next month, after having stopped all funding in 2011 and fully withdrawn almost six years ago.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay told Member States that the decision was “a strong act of confidence, in UNESCO and in multilateralism,” and in the way that the agency was implementing its mandate on culture, education, science and information.

UNESCO said that in a letter sent to Ms. Azoulay, the US State Department “welcomed the way in which UNESCO had addressed in recent years emerging challenges, modernized its management, and reduced political tensions”.

The country stopped funding UNESCO in 2011 after the organization extended membership to Palestine. At the time, US funding made up 22 per cent of the agency’s budget. The United States is a founding member of UNESCO and had withdrawn once before, in 1984, then rejoined in 2003.

Dominika Tomaszewska-Mortimer, UN News.