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...

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 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 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...

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...

I was born in Cape Coast, the capital of Ghana’s Central Region. I spent part of my childhood there, and part in Akim Oda, in the Eastern Region. My parents were divorced, so my childhood living situation involved a series of transitions: I lived with my mother and grandmother for a while, moved in with...