2Department of Population Studies 3School of Statistics and Applied Economics

The objective of this paper was to study working children and child labour among children in Uganda. The most important question paused was if children in child labour were orphans or not. This paper was based on secondary data from the 2005/6 Uganda National household survey. Overall, 36 percent of the children were involved in some kind of work whether for pay or on own. There are also children who worked for pay, worked for own account and worked for the household. The results further show that child labour accounted for almost one in five (19.2%). Despite Uganda being a signatory to the UN convention on the rights of children, one in three children is working and one in five is involved in child labour. In urban areas, the proportion of children working for money is also an indication of child labour. Whereas the pretext is that children involved in child labour are mainly orphans, results showed that orphans were not more vulnerable to child labour than the other children. Key words: Orphans, workloa