Child Labour Monitoring (CLM) involves the development of a coordinated multi-sector monitoring and referral process that aims to cover all children living Child Labour Monitoring (CLM) involves the development of a coordinated multi-sector monitoring and referral process that aims to cover all children living in a given geographical area. Its principal activities include regularly repeated direct observations to identify child labourers and to determine risks to which they are exposed, referral of these children to services, verification that they have been removed and tracking them afterwards to ensure that they have satisfactorily alternatives.

A community based child labour monitoring system is specifically aimed at (a) building awareness about child labour within communities and amongst other key players such as district and central government officials; (b) mobilizing of key players and forming of coordinating groups within communities (such as child labour committees); (c) establishing procedures and developing monitoring tools; (d) creating information recording systems for the collection, input, verification, consolidation and storage of data about the children identified; and (e) reporting this information to relevant authorities, service providers and communities.

Community-based child labour monitoring committees are typically composed of community leaders, teachers, health promoters, representatives from the families concerned and sometimes with children or adolescents withdrawn from work. They carry out monitoring visits to workplaces. These visits are conducted on a regular basis and often in conjunction with official visits by labour inspectors.

Eight monitoring tools, or questionnaires, has been designed for the community-based child labour monitoring system. The first set of four comprises baseline questionnaires and the second set of four are monitoring (or follow-up) questionnaires. Each set includes questionnaires for: (i) child labourers; (ii) children withdrawn from child labour and supported through the project; (iii) educational institutions; and (iv) employers of child labourers.

The CLM process comprises the procedures and tools that enable monitoring to be implemented correctly and can be divided into four phases:
1)Preparation: the preparatory phase ensures that the conditions necessary for monitoring are met, and that the CLM process will be designed and developed in such away that it is feasible and reflects local institutional capacities and policies.
2)Design, test and training: this phase ensures that monitoring tools have been properly designed and that those concerned have adequate skills and capacities to manage and conduct the actual monitoring and referral activities.
3)Monitoring: in the monitoring phase, visits to workplaces and referral to schools and other service sites take place. The monitoring is conducted by multi-skilled monitoring teams who are selected for this task with established roles, responsibilities and procedures monitoring and referral activities
4)Follow-up: the design and testing of the CLM process must be consultative, participatory and based on a common agreement by all concerned parties. In this phase, the information collected through monitoring is made available for use, and girls and boys removed from child labour are actively tracked in order to ensure that as a result of monitoring children have alternatives to child labour.