It is depressing to hear that Bolivia has become the first country to legalise child labour, reducing the minimum age of employment from 14 years old to just 10.

The new law contravenes the International Labour Organisation's (ILO) minimum working age protocol and is an abandonment of a child's right to a childhood.

There are some protections included in the law: children between 10 and 12 must be supervised by a parent while they work, under-12s are not permitted to undertake third-party employment, and children must still attend school.

But with about 850,000 child labourers in Bolivia and only 78 inspectors, it will be difficult to uphold these protections. And how will children, exhausted after a day's work, be able to engage in learning? They risk missing out on a proper education, eroding their chances for better paid employment in future. Rather than breaking the cycle of poverty and illiteracy, the new law appears to entrench it.

Without a proscription on child labour, the limits on what is permissible are likely to become blurred and then extended. It is not fanciful to worry that this law could lead to a greater regional acceptance of child labour, making it harder to eradicate.

But Bolivia is not an isolated example. Since 2005, the number of child slaves remains at about 5.5 million. This suggests that many of the most difficult and entrenched manifestations of child exploitation have not been addressed.

Many development practitioners argue that broader economic progress will ultimately remove the causes of child labour and slavery. If that was true then Bolivia's political surrender should mean little as law is a mere sideshow to economic progress.

But such a view is not well supported by the lessons of history, which show that effective implementation of robust legislation has been vital in the fight against child labour.

Child labour and slavery are mainly social and political phenomena, rather than economic ones. Approaches to eradicating these problems should therefore be social and political rather than the technocratic approaches that predominate.

Over the past 10 years, the number of working children has fallen, in tandem with efforts to stamp out poverty. National and international aid programmes and NGOs have failed to directly address the challenge of child labour and slavery, let alone adult forced labour, as central elements of the development agenda.

Ending child labour and slavery were not included in the millennium development goals, and they are only tangentially touched upon in proposals for the sustainable development goals that will replace them next year.

Perhaps Bolivia sees no real way to end child labour. If that is the case, people working in development should engage with the government to help establish new approaches, with eradicating the practice as their central purpose. These should include universal access to education and helping families to keep their children in school, rather than prematurely moving them into work. But they should also include appropriate vocational and entrepreneurial education, so children can conceive less harmful ways to support their families to help the entire community to grow.

It is too easy and self-indulgent to get angry at Bolivia for taking such a regressive step in the struggle against child labour. It would be better to accept that we, and our political and development leaders, have collectively failed to address the political and social challenges, so it is still perceived as necessary and socially acceptable for children as young as 10 to contribute so fundamentally to their family's finances.

We should demand that leaders engage with us, so that sustained and expanded progress to end child labour can be achieved.