Child Labour, Gender and Vulnerable Employment in Adulthood. Evidence for Tanzania

Abstract

Using the panel survey for the Kagera region of Tanzania, we select children who were seven to 15 years old in the 1990s and follow up with them in the first decade of the 2000s to study the consequences of child labour on their status in employment in adulthood. We estimate fixed effects linear probability models. We find that child labour is associated with vulnerable employment and that this result is driven by girls. Age plays a crucial role in the determination of the sign of the child labour effect. On average, for children younger than 10 child labour has only negative effects. The negative effects of domestic chores are quite large: the probability of vulnerable employment increases considerably for girls under 13, up to 20 percentage points for 10-year-olds. Child labour on the household farm has even more adverse effects. Overall, these findings highlight the important role of child labour in the determination of the gender gap in employment.