For more than two decades, governments, industry organisations, and NGOs have intervened in Ghana with the explicit aim of eliminating child labour. Some of their actions have been brutal. Parents and caregivers have been arrested, property has been damaged, and children have been taken from their families at gunpoint. Those causing this turmoil justify their actions by alleging that the villagers are trafficking and enslaving their own youth.
Ghanaians in rural and impoverished areas don’t dispute that large numbers of young people work in agricultural labour, fishing, construction, hawking, and other precarious jobs. But their understanding of what is happening and why is different to that of the abolitionists. The series that begins today on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery gives them space to tell their story in their own words. It includes a variety of voices, but above all it presents children’s perspectives on their work and their suggestions for an effective response to it.
Explore the Series
- Why do children work? 'We will not have food to eat'
- Why do children work? ‘To attain my future’
- ‘They steal our children and beat their parents’: a story of anti-trafficking in Ghana
- Taken in the name of ‘rescue’: a child responds
- Why do children work? ‘We have no helper in this world’
- The home economics of child labour
- Why do children work? ‘To become big men and women’
- Why do children work? ‘To learn a trade’
- Why do children work? ‘It is how I take care of myself’
A microcosm of a global campaign
We gathered testimonies for this series from the fishing communities on Lake Volta and the farming and mining areas in the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana. Both areas are favourite targets for anti-trafficking interventions, but neither child labour nor efforts to prevent it are limited to Ghana. The International Labour Organization estimates that 160 million children are working globally, with 79 million of them in the ‘worst forms of child labour’. Since 2016 these numbers have risen by 8.4 million and 6.5 million respectively. This increase has happened despite tens of millions of dollars being spent, multiple international conventions being signed, and 2021 being declared the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour.
