‘Age is just a number’: Articulating the cultural dimension of child labour in Africa's small-scale mining sector

Abstract

This paper engages critically with socio-cultural debates on child labour in sub-Saharan Africa, with a view toward articulating more comprehensively why young boys and girls pursue so-called ‘hazardous’ work in the region's artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector. Today, a discourse of ‘forced (child) labour’ propelled by images of, and anecdotal claims made about, the ASM sector is being widely promoted across sub-Saharan Africa, despite little being known about the social context within which the region's children live. Drawing on a qualitative case study of child labour in Ghana's ASM sector, it is argued that, at the community level, views on maturity and readiness to enter the labour market contrast sharply with the ideas underpinning the concept of ‘childhood’ at the heart of legal and policy frameworks for child protection and child labour eradication. Both have historical roots in Western elite and middle-class milieus.