According to the Peruvian Constitution the legal minimum age for child workers is 12 years old, making it the youngest level in Latin America and among other continents. More than 2 million children in Peru are employed in agriculture, gold mines, as domestic workers and street sellers. Peru is the latest country where conditional cash transfers have been implemented in Latin America. The question is whether a targeted or universal approach of basic rights and income would be the most fruitful in enhancing school attendance and eradicating child labour. This highlights the importance of factors such as vulnerability within the family that can potentially lead to child labour. This paper examines in depth the arbitrary method of targeting and the exclusion from the programme of groups at greater risk such as street children and single mothers by collecting recent quantitative data from the World Bank and the Peruvian Government (2009) and by interviews with programmes executives of United Nations agencies and NGOs. From the results it can be concluded that the only sustainable fashion to enhance the life chances of Peruvian children is to create strong mechanisms of social protection, such as basic income and services, to every household.