Child Labour, Education and Child Rights Among Cocoa Producers in Ghana

Abstract

The International Labour Organization (ILO) reports that 246 million children aged five to 17 worldwide are involved in child labour, that nearly three-quarters of these are exposed to the worst forms of child labour, and that 73 million working children worldwide are under the age of ten. This last figure alone is greater than the entire UK population. The highest proportion of working children is in Sub-Saharan Africa where nearly one-third of children age 14 and under (48 million children) are in some form of employment. Seventy per cent work in the agricultural sector such as on farms or in cattle herding. Although children in the agricultural sector vastly outnumber children stitching footballs or weaving carpets in sweatshops, they have received much less attention (Human Rights Watch, 2002a). The case of children working on cocoa farms in rural Ghana (and on cocoa farms across West Africa in general) have been a notable exception to this lack of attention. The interest in labour conditions of cocoa growers was sparked by the discovery in April 2001 of a ship in the Gulf of Guinea, which was initially erroneously thought to be taking trafficked children to work on cocoa farms in one of the West African countries.KeywordsCorporate Social ResponsibilityFair TradeChild LabourCorporal PunishmentSchool EnrolmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.