CHILD LABOUR IN GHANA –THE MISCONCEPTION

RECENTLY, the media, both local and international, have spurned out stories about child labour in Ghana’s cocoa growing areas. Following this, there have been unwarranted calls by some interest groups for the boycott of the finest cocoa beans produced in the world.
There is no doubt that there are cases of child labour in the country, however, the picture painted about the kind of assistance or work done by children on cocoa farms was misplaced, because child labour is employed rather in subsistence agriculture.
In the urban (informal sector), other forms of the phenomenon equally exist.
As someone who grew up on a cocoa farm and from a typical cocoa growing community in Ghana, I am in this article attempting to lay bare the myth or as it were, the truth about the use of children on cocoa farms. And whether what pertains qualifies or fits the tag ‘child labour’ vis-à-vis other sectors, in contrast with what generally pertains in the rest of the world.
We should not allow such self-seeking people to throw dust into the eyes of the world to paint a gloomy picture about the future of the youth in this country, because what pertains is a complete misunderstanding of child labour.
As a child, it was always fun to accompany parents or relatives to the cocoa farm, especially when it was time to crack the pods to extract the beans.
My late uncle, under whose tutelage I grew up, had many wives as well as many children who assisted him on his vast cocoa farms. That work, for us children, was seasonal, because weeding or general work was done at a time that school was on long vacation. We would all leave the town for the village to assist, and what was interesting was the rats and other animals that we trapped during our activities. I reminisce being a poor shooter of the catapult, and I was always envious of my cousins who were good at shooting at birds and butchering the rats when it came to smoking them out.
While on vacation at the village, it was all work and no play and my uncle ensured none of us fell sick or got injured. He cautioned us to be careful and he bought some basic first aid drugs such as paracetamol, APC, codeine and the others which I cannot readily recollect.
He made sure that we worked, but that did not compromise our education in any way . All of us were in school with the elders among us in higher levels of the educational ladder at that time. Once you have not attained a certain standard of self-actualisation, going on vacation to the village was a must and something we relished so much. As soon as school re-opened, work on the cocoa farms ceased and off we left for the town to continue with our schooling.
In those days, that was the general practice in the villages of the Sefwi area where the bulk of Ghana’s cocoa is still produced. Even tenants who worked on such farms allowed their children to go to school, except a few who did not heed all advice.
The work of children involved general weeding, collection of cocoa pods to a cracking centre or point and helping in the drying of cocoa beans. I remember that when my uncle wanted us to have some money of our own, he would pay us extra for conveying the dry beans to the shed, and this we cherished, because we got extra income to buy other things for ourselves. After the cocoa beans had been fermented, we assisted in carting them to the dry beds.
At some point in time, I remember that as children, we engaged in what is called ‘nnoboa’ (akan), literally translated as “help one another”. By this system, a group of youngsters, usually siblings or friends would arrange for weeding and charge fees for very small cocoa farms which were not too overgrown with weeds.
This is not to say that what I have said here was the general trend in what is called child labour on cocoa farms if that is so, because some children obviously did not have the chance to go to school and so spent their entire lives on the farms.
It is, therefore, necessary to look at what actually constitutes child labour in the eyes of comity of nations and do some analyses on whether Ghana is being treated fairly.
From my point of view, working on cocoa farms was generally done by children or relatives of farmers on a subsistence basis and neither compromised nor harmed the education of those involved. The picture has been painted as if the practice exists only in poor countries or communities such as Ghana.
This is not to say that I am in support of the practice, especially since the 1990s when every country in the world, except Somalia and the United States have become signatories to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
The CRC provides the strongest, most consistent international legal language prohibiting illegal child labour, although it does not make child labour illegal. The UNICEF State of the World’s Children’s Report (1997) lists four "myths" about child labour. That the practice is only a problem in developing countries. But in fact, children routinely work in all industrialised countries, and are engaged in hazardous forms of child labour. They are in many countries, including the US, for example, where it is said that children are employed in agriculture, a high proportion of them from immigrant or ethnic-minority families.
A 1990 survey of Mexican-American children working on the farms of New York State showed that almost half had worked in fields still wet with pesticides and over a third had themselves been sprayed.
Child labour is the employment of a child under an age determined by law or custom. This practice is considered exploitative by many countries and international organisations, hence the vain attack on Ghana.
Child labour was utilised to varying extents through most of history, but entered public dispute with the beginning of universal education, universal schooling, with changes in working conditions during industrialisation, and with the emergence of the concepts of labour rights and workers as well as children's rights.
Ghana’s constitution is in accordance with international conventions which define a child as those persons aged 18 years and under.
However, a child and childhood are defined differently by different cultures. A child is not necessarily delineated by a fixed age, that is why social scientists point out that children’s abilities and levels of maturity vary so much that defining a child’s maturity by calendar age can be misleading.
It is in the light of this that we should try to avoid confusion, when writing or speaking about child labour.
Generally speaking, child labour is about a work for children which, in turn, harms them or exploits them in some way, either physically, mentally, morally, or by blocking their access to education.
Not all work is bad for children though. That is why some social scientists point out that some kinds of work may be completely unobjectionable except for one thing about the work that makes it exploitative.
As UNICEF’s 1997 State of the World’s Children Report puts it, "Children’s work needs to be seen as happening along a continuum, with destructive or exploitative work at one end and beneficial work - promoting or enhancing children’s development without interfering with their schooling, recreation and rest — at the other.
In 2000, the ILO estimated that 246 million child workers, aged five and 17 were involved in child labour, of which 171 million were involved in work that, by its nature, is hazardous to their safety, physical or mental health, and moral development. Moreover, some 8.4 million children were engaged in so-called 'unconditional' worst forms of child labour, which include forced and bonded labour, the use of children in armed conflict, trafficking in children and commercial sexual exploitation.
According to a 1998 study by the ILO, there were 61 per cent child labourers in Asia, 32 per cent in Africa, and seven per cent in Latin America, one per cent in the US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations. In Asia, 22 per cent of the workforce is reported to be children. In Latin America, 17 per cent of the workforce is also children. The proportion of child labourers has been found to vary a lot among countries, and even regions inside those countries.
The UNICEF 1997 State of the World’s Children Report said in Africa, one child in three is at work, and in Latin America, one child in five works. In these continents, only a tiny proportion of child workers are involved in the formal sector, and the vast majority of work is for their families, in homes, in the fields or on the streets.
Child labour is very common, and that can be factory work, mining or quarrying, agriculture, helping in the parents' business, having one's own small business (for example selling food or apparel), or doing odd jobs. Some children work as guides for tourists, sometimes combined with bringing in business for shops and restaurants, where they may also work as waiters. Other children are forced to do tedious and repetitive jobs such as polishing shoes, pounding fufu in chop bars and cleaning. However, rather than in factories and sweatshops, most child labour occurs in the informal sector, selling on the street, or child domestic work hidden away in houses far from the reach of official labour inspectors and from media scrutiny.
E. P. Thompson in “The Making of the English Working Class”, (Penguin, 1968), said in the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four years were employed in production factories with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions.
Poverty is widely considered the top reason why children work at inappropriate jobs for their ages. But there are other reasons such as family expectations and traditions as I have indicated in the case of the Ghanaian farmer, abuse of the child as in the case of house helps or maid servants (as they are called in Ghana and domestic work in other places) and public opinion that downplays the risk of early work for children.
The current situation in poor countries is that poor families often rely on the labour of their children for survival, and sometimes it is their only source of income. This type of work is often hidden away because it is not in the industrial sector.
By all standards, the kind of labour supplied by most Ghanaian children on cocoa farms cannot be classified as child labour as per the standards of the ILO and other bodies. Probably, a look at what pertains in some homes and on the streets regarding kayayei, shoe shine boys and the lot paints a gloomy picture for the youth of this country.
Beyond compassion, we should consider who today’s children will become in the future. Between today and the year 2020, the clear indication is that the vast majority of new workers, citizens and new consumers whose skills and needs will build the world’s economy and society will come from developing countries. Over that 12-year period or so, it is estimated that more than 730 million people will join the world’s workforce more than all the other people employed in today's most developed nations.
According to research by Population Action International, more than 90 per cent of these new workers will be from developing nations. Governments of the developing economies should devised programmes to emancipate the people.
Programmes to prop up increased family incomes, education that helps children learn skills which will help them earn a living, social services which help children and families survive such crises as diseases, or loss of home and shelter. Above all, families should control fertility so that they are not burdened by children. Poverty alleviation programmes should be the target, because so far as poverty pertains, child labour will continue to be with us.