Changing Livelihoods, Changing Childhoods: Patterns of Children's Work in Rural Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

This article explores the dynamics of children's work among the Gedeo ethnic community in southern Ethiopia. It examines how a shift in livelihood strategies, accompanied by unfair trade, the HIV/AIDS epidemic and neo-liberal policies, is affecting the survival strategies of children within families. The growing significance of export-led crops like coffee over the local subsistence economy has changed rural livelihoods. With plummeting coffee prices in the global market, the migration of adult members of the household to secure off-farm employment has altered children's domestic work patterns. The change includes increasing pressure for children's participation in multiple reproductive and income-generating activities. The cash economy, while giving children and young people the opportunity to contribute to family livelihoods, is accelerating age- and gender-based divisions of labor with more boys engaging in the production and sale of commercial crops than girls. It has also led their participation in deeply unequal and exploitative system of international trade. The article concludes by placing children's changing re-productive activities at the heart of structural and North–South relations in trade and development.