In lots of ways, my journey in life reflects the experience of many underprivileged young Ghanaians. However, it was also different because I grew up in a rural area with a single parent and siblings. The shoes of an absent father were difficult to fill, and I missed the touch and grooming a father usually...

I was one of eight children in a middle-class suburban family in post-war America. Work and working were very important parts of my father’s identity. Domestic work My earliest engagement with work was in the domestic sphere. The division of domestic work amongst my siblings was highly gendered. The girls did the dishes, and the...

I was raised in Ho, the capital city of the Ho Municipal District in the Volta Region of Ghana. The city lies between Mount Adaklu and the Atakora mountains in Togo. The people of Ho are predominately smallholder farmers and petty traders. I lived my entire childhood and some part of my adult years there....

I want to recount the small amounts of paid work that I did in the mid-1960s as a boy aged around 9-12 in the prosperous commuter suburb where we lived. This was about 30 miles north-west of Central London in Buckinghamshire, one of the ring of ‘Home Counties’ which surround the capital. Cleaning cars for...

I was born in rural Michigan in 1892. I started my educational career in a one-room country school when I was six years old. Grades were from one to eight and were taught by one teacher. The school was about a mile from our house and while it was a rather pleasant walk when the...

This year the World Day Against Child Labour focuses on the need to protect children in the context of the global pandemic. More broadly, to safeguard children from dangerous and hazardous work, ACHA is calling for policymakers, researchers and practitioners to better understand the realities of children’s work and the harm can arise from it....

I grew up in a small town called Bibiani in the Western Region of Ghana. Life in the community was normal. My now-deceased father was a farmer and a tailor while my mother worked as a petty trader selling smoked fish (and she still does today). At the age of seven, I started accompanying my...

I come from a family in the Netherlands whose business was growing vegetables. The farm was small, only 0.7 hectare. When I was born the farm was very diversified, but by the time I was in my twenties, it was totally specialised in tomatoes with substrate cultivation. I worked quite often on the farm during...

I grew up in the village of Kings Langley, 20 miles north-west of London. Nowadays it is a commuter suburb of London. My father was a shy man and was devoted to his garden, and we were lucky to have a relatively large garden where he grew vegetables and soft fruit. We also had four...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, until I was 13 years old, I lived with my grandmother in Takoradi, in Ghana’s Western Region. There were 13 of us in the house and the respective roles of adults and children were very clear. Household chores for children (six years plus) included cleaning dishes, stepping out...