A/HRC/12/21 page 11 43. In many situations the agreement between the worker and the employer is made orally and no safeguards exist for a person to protect him/herself from long-term or perpetual enslavement. Evidence shows that entire families have been forced to repay a debt or obtain a loan. Based on information collected from NGOs, although children’s work remains unrecognized and unremunerated, children carry the burden of debt along with their parents and are made to work to help repay the debt. Crucially, children will inherit their parents’ debts in the event of their parents’ deaths. This process perpetuates the cycle from generation to generation, thus extending slavery and establishing new slavery precedents in modern reality. 44. Data also show that emerging and widespread manifestations of bonded labour occur when in order to obtain the money for exceptional family circumstances such as health problems or education for children, entire families are forced to work to repay a debt.14 Causes 45. Poverty plays a crucial role in explaining bonded labour. Bonded labourers, both urban and rural, are chronically poor. The vast majority are initially trapped in bonded labour because they have no other way of subsisting apart from taking a loan from a landlord or an employer. Many take such loans because they do not have enough money to meet their basic daily needs or to pay for a specific event like a wedding or a funeral. 46. In many instances, NGOs claim that isolation, lack of guidance, lack of contact with institutions and authorities that could assist the communities, as well as a lack of basic services have created a situation of extreme vulnerability which has facilitated exploitation and forced labour. 47. The low level of education of the concerned populations also puts them in a vulnerable situation as they are not able to understand the nature of their debts or control them in any way. The lack of education also leads to a lack of knowledge and understanding of their rights as workers and, in some cases, as indigenous people. They are not able to negotiate any kind of workers’ rights such as minimum wages, maximum daily work hours, holidays, frequency of pay and methods of payment. 48. Bonded labourers are mostly from socially excluded groups, including indigenous people, minorities and migrants, who suffer additionally from discrimination and political disenfranchisement. 49. The indigenous and minority populations are more vulnerable to bonded labour because in many countries, they have limited access to land for their traditional income-generating activities such as cultivation or hunting.15 The issue of land ownership is closely linked with the phenomenon of bonded labour. 14 See Bales, op. cit. 15 Kaye and Mcquade, op. cit., p. 4.