Farmers' Children Involvement in Cassava Production in Akure South Local Government Area of Ondo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Child's labour has attracted the global attention in recent times and the ILO has come up with several conventions to address the issue. For a developing nation like Nigeria that are reported to have alarming child's labour cases, it is then expedient to examine the children's involvement in cassava production since this is currently in the heart of the governmentagricultural reforms to improve the lots of the rural dwellers. This study investigates the involvement of farmers' children in cassava production inAkure South local government area of Ondo State, Nigeria. A field survey was carried out in which data was obtained from 120 farmers' children in Akure south L.G.A. using multi-stage sampling technique. The data collected were analyzed using frequency counts and percentageswhile the hypotheses were tested with Pearson's correlation coefficient.Majority of the respondents are within the age group of 13 and15 years (46.7%).More than half of the respondents are males (58.3%).About 60.8% of the respondents are in post primary school. Respondents are predominantly Christians (71.7%).Majority (55.8%) of the respondents' parents have less than 3000 heaps of cassava. About 32.5% of the respondents have their own farms. The study also shows that more than half (50.83%) of the respondents have low involvement in pre harvest activities while 65.00% of the respondents had medium involvement in post harvest activities. Pearson's r-coefficient shows that age is positively and significantly related to level of involvement (r = 0.466) at 0.01 level of significance. Religion of the respondents significantly affect their levels of involvement in cassava production(r =0.221) at 0.05 level of significance while gender, level of education and the respondents' parents' farmsize had no significant relationship with their level of involvement in cassava production. The study concludes that the children's ages and moral teaching taught to them can affect their involvement in cassava production. And the study recommends that education should be made accessible to the poor farmers' children in rural communities by government. And that government should encourage moral teachings (through religions teachings) and agriculture as a subject being taught to these children in their schools.Keywords: Child labour, production, farmers' children, level of involvement