This paper explores policy and legislation aimed at preventing, regulating, and abolishing harmful children’s work in Ghana, and the political debates and controversies surrounding these mechanisms. The paper critically interrogates the successes and challenges of previous and current policies and interventions. It concludes that legislation and interventions aimed at preventing hazardous or harmful work should...

This paper provides an overview of issues related to disabled children and work. This is a very unexplored topic and the literature is scant, so the paper first provides an overview of some key relevant background information on: disability globally and in Ghana, disability and employment, disabled children and relevant human rights approaches – the...

This paper presents different types of governance mechanisms that can be present in a specific value chain and explores how these can be used or need to be modified in view of intentions to reduce children’s harmful work. We primarily look at the way that the unobservable process-related quality attributes of a product are currently...

Children work throughout the Lake Volta fisheries value chain. It is commonly assumed most have been trafficked. Research and advocacy has focused on dangers to young boys harvesting fish, and poverty as a driver, precluding attention to harms experienced by non-trafficked children, girls’ experiences and work-education dynamics. More work is needed on the proportions of...

A central and implicit issue that shapes the present political and institutional consensus surrounding child labour is the notion of harm. Although efforts to address children’s work rest firmly on assumptions about what is harmful, no coherent theory of harm exists. In this paper, we critically explore ‘harm’ in the context of children’s work and...

Children’s engagement with work has been widely researched using a wide variety of methods. However, the extent to which such methods and their combination provides insight into forms of children’s harmful work (CHW) is not obvious. This paper reviews and assesses respective opportunities and challenges of the main methods that have been used to study...

This paper synthesises the available literature on the forms, prevalence and drivers of children’s work, and evidence of harm associated with children’s work in shallot production on the Keta Peninsula, Ghana. What emerges is that children have historically played, and continue to play, a key role in this horticultural system and their work contribution is...

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....