Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa 9781588268617

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Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa

Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa

Loretta E. Bass

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

Published in the United States of America in 2004 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2004 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bass, Loretta Elizabeth. Child labor in sub-Saharan Africa / Loretta E. Bass. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58826-286-3 (Hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Child labor—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 2. Children—Africa, Sub-Saharan—Economic conditions. 3. Poor children—Africa, Sub-Saharan. 4. Child abuse—Africa, Sub-Saharan. I. Title. HD6250.A3572B37 2004 331.3’1’0967—dc22 2003026518 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5

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To my children, Augustus and Elliott, who reaffirm the potential of children and childhood for me each and every day

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

ix xi

1 Why Study Child Labor in Africa?

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2 The Cultural and Historical Context of Child Labor

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3 The Political Economy of Children’s Work

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4 Unequal Terrain: Rural vs. Urban Child Labor

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5 Work and School: Coordination and Conflict

99

6 The Value of Children’s Work: Getting the Short End of the Stick

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7 Expendable Laborers: Children as Soldiers, Prostitutes, and Slaves

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8 Making Sense of Child Labor in Africa

179

Bibliography Index About the Book

191 205 213

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Illustrations

Map Africa

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Tables 1.1 Children Five to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force by World Region, 2002 1.2 World Development Indicators by Region, 2002 1.3 Children Ten to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force by African Region, 1992 2.1 Religious and Cultural Influences in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1998 3.1 Children Ten to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force and Other Characteristics by Country 3.2 Child Labor Rates and Distribution of Income by Country, 2002 3.3 International Law: Conventions on Child Labor 4.1 Distribution of African Population by Urban Area, 1960 and 1999 5.1 Children’s Work, School Enrollment, and Adult Literacy, 2001

4 5 7 17 45 50 63 78 103

Figures 1.1 Children in Labor Force by World Region, 2002 1.2 Children Ten to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001 2.1 Religious and Cultural Influences in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1998

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Illustrations

3.1 Children in Labor Force by Income in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001 3.2 Children in Labor Force by Rural Population in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001 3.3 Children in Labor Force by GDP from Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001 4.1 Distribution of African Population by Urban Area, 1960 and 1999 5.1 Children in Labor Force by Primary School Enrollment Ratio, 2001 5.2 Adult Literacy Rate by Primary School Enrollment Ratio, 2001 5.3 Children in Labor Force by Adult Literacy Rate, 2001

47 48 49 79 104 104 105

Acknowledgments

The many children and their families I met while conducting fieldwork in open-air markets in western Africa inspired this book. I wish to thank these children and their families for supporting me in my research and becoming the focus of it. The children whom I observed were not victims of circumstance and lack of opportunity, but active agents in molding their own lives and providing for their families in an austere economic environment. They enjoyed life, laughed, and played much like children in rich countries, but most of the time they did not attend school regularly and were responsible for much of their own economic well-being. Much of the research on child labor reduces children to statistics or treats them entirely as hapless victims. I hope to keep their voices and willful spirits alive as I tell their stories in the following pages. I am indebted to a number of people who have inspired my work, namely York Bradshaw, Claudia Buchmann, William Corsaro, Bruce Fuller, Beverly Grier, Olga Nieuwenhuys, Jens Qvortrup, Bernard Schlemmer, and Barrie Thorne. Josef Gugler led me to the topic of child labor in graduate school and provided much initial support and enthusiasm as I completed my doctorate under his direction. He also gave me an appreciation for the many layers that one must permeate in order to do meaningful research in another culture. Michael Bourdillon, Philip Havik, Karen Porter, Kate Rosier, and Fatou Sow helped me clarify my thinking on this subject through collaborations and insightful reviews. I wish to thank the two anonymous manuscript reviewers whose comments pushed my analysis to a more insightful level. Additionally, Lynne Rienner has given essential encouragement and constructive criticism at key points. She has also pushed me to say what I mean and to do so enthusiastically yet parsimoniously. Jennifer Rano created the wonderful maps and tables throughout this book as part of the Honors College Undergradu-

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Acknowledgments

ate Research Assistant Program at the University of Oklahoma. Nicole Warehime, a graduate assistant at the University of Oklahoma, shouldered a great deal of my classroom administrative tasks so that I could devote more time to this project. My university colleagues Trina Hope and Ann Beutel have helped me keep seven spinning plates in the air during this project. In my fieldwork, Adama Ndiaye and Yeya Wane gave me an abundance of cultural guidance and research assistance when I carried out a national survey of child market workers in Senegal during the mid-1990s. These two women continue to inspire my research and its voice. My friends Neil Meriwether, Fakhry Taleb, Martine and Vincent Robert, and Amy Patterson all have provided technical support at critical points throughout this project. Neil’s mother, Margaret, even provided a room with a view to tap out the initial transcriptions of interviews that became the basis for chapters. I am also grateful to my colleague-friends Silke Roth, Ruth Arnold, Julia McQuillan, and Stephane Baldi for their unconditional support and encouragement since we met in graduate school. My husband, John, has stood by as my editor, confidante, and best friend throughout ten years of fieldwork and writing on this subject. Thank you all.

Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa

Africa (heavy line indicates boundary between North and Sub-Saharan Africa)

1 Why Study Child Labor in Africa?

Not all child labor is bad. Dealing with it as universally evil complicates any strategies that might address the issue. Indeed, in many circumstances child labor is a mixed blessing, as households juggle opportunities to let their children eat. Here are the voices of children in Accra, Ghana, who work but also attend a part-time school or “street academy” for working children run by a nongovernmental organization: Kadigotso, who sells shoes in the marketplace, explains, “I start work early in the morning at about 7 a.m. and don’t finish until seven in the evening. I don’t like working because I get very tired but I have no choice because my family is very poor.” Ebeneezer, who works to support his family, explains, “There’s nothing wrong with working because I have to look after my mother. My father’s dead and I have four brothers and three sisters.” Linda, who is thirteen years old, explains, “I sell ice water in the market with my mother. I don’t like the work but when I grow up I want to be a hairdresser.”1 Each of these children is connected to a household. Each generates valuable income to support and provide basic necessities for a family. Each must juggle the need to work with the need to attend formal school. None makes the six o’clock news, because it is considered more newsworthy to discuss children who work in more extreme conditions. Yet children like these compose roughly 95 percent of children who work in sub-Saharan African countries. Generally, children’s concerns are ignored or relegated to a secondary status in international development research. One observer remarks that the scarcity of research to date by international development scholars is disturbing because “children represent one of the most vulnerable groups in most societies.”2 Children are also especially numerous in developing countries; children under fourteen years old compose over 40 percent of the total population of subSaharan Africa, compared to only 16 percent and 21 percent in Western

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Child Labor

Europe and North America respectively. If we allow child labor to go misunderstood today, then its social consequences will only compound with time and neglect. Although most media and scholarly attention to the subject has concentrated on Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, the highest rate of child labor is found in Africa.3 Almost one in three children between the ages of five and fourteen are economically active in Africa, compared with fewer than one in five children in Asia and one in six children in Latin America. Table 1.1 shows estimates for the actual number of children in each region, the estimated number of children who work, and the proportion of children who work. There are 127.3 million children who are economically active in Asia and the Pacific, compared with 48 million children in Africa, 17.4 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 13.4 million in the Middle East and North Africa.4 Figure 1.1 shows how the larger population in Asian countries translates into more children working in absolute terms despite the reality that the magnitude of the problem is far greater for African societies. African countries rank among the poorest in the world. Each year, the World Bank ranks countries from the poorest to the richest, and places them into one of four categories: low-income economies, lower-middleincome economies, upper-middle-income economies, and high-income economies. An overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African countries, thirty-five of forty-one, are ranked in the lowest category, as shown in Table 1.2. 5 When considering regions of the world in this table, subSaharan Africa ranks at the bottom in terms of gross national income per capita, life expectancy at birth, and under-five mortality, and very near the bottom in terms of adult illiteracy. Across these regions, the relationships between higher income and higher life expectancy, lower under-five child

Table 1.1

Children Five to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force by World Region, 2002

Number of Children (in millions) Sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Pacific Latin America and Caribbean Middle East and North Africa

166.9 665.1 108.1 87.9

Number of Working Children (in millions)

Percentage of Working Children

48.0 127.3 17.4 13.4

28.8 19.1 16.1 15.2

Source: Estimates of economically active children taken from International Labour Organization (ILO), International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labour (SIMPOC), Every Child Counts: New Global Estimates on Child Labor (Geneva: ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, 2002), p. 17.

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Why Study Child Labor in Africa? Figure 1.1

Children in Labor Force by World Region, 2002

Source: Estimates for children five to fourteen years old taken from International Labour Organization (ILO). International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labour (SIMPOC), Every Child Counts: New Estimates on Child Labour (Geneva: ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, 2002), p. 17.

Table 1.2

World Development Indicators by Region, 2002 Life Under-Five Adult Expectancy Mortality Illiteracy GNI at Birth per 1,000 15+ Low-Income (ppp)a in Years Live Births Years (%) Classificationb

Sub-Saharan Africa South Asia East Asia and Pacific Middle East and North Africa Europe and Central Asia Latin America and Caribbean

1,560 2,260 4,120 5,170 6,620 7,030

47 63 69 68 69 70

159 99 44 54 26 38

39 46 15 36 3 12

35 of 41 6 of 8 8 of 23 1 of 16 8 of 28 2 of 23

Source: World Bank, World Development Report 2002 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 233, 241. Notes: a. GNI refers to gross national income per capita, in U.S. dollars, adjusted to reflect purchasing power parity (ppp) across countries and calculated using the World Bank Atlas method. b. Low-income classification refers to countries with a 2000 gross national income per capita of U.S.$755 or less calculated using the World Bank Atlas method.

mortality, and lower levels of adult illiteracy provide convincing evidence that addressing the poverty issue is an important concern. In order to address the low-income problem in sub-Saharan Africa, we also need to consider child labor. The International Labour Organization (ILO) names poverty as a major factor in child labor.6 Viewing child labor as merely symptomatic of such a monolith helps explain why so little research and development has been

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Child Labor

devoted to the work of children. Child labor is a function of poverty, but often differs along many factors that may vary from child to child. Certainly, child labor is a companion to poverty in a mutually reinforcing relationship. Failure to grasp how child labor actually perpetuates poverty results in misallocated government and development expenditures, and costs African societies the ability to integrate into the increasingly technological global economy. The cycles of poverty and child labor, and of rural underdevelopment and lack of education, could be broken. However, if children work rather than attend school, it becomes increasingly difficult for these children to gain economic independence as adults and more tricky for African countries to raise incomes and standards of living. Their ability to compete in a global marketplace first rests on their ability to play catch-up. At present, these children and their parents compete in a global labor market where they come to the table with few internationally competitive skills. Compounding this, children come to the global playing field with lower social status, which generally translates into a lower value of their work even when completing similar and identical tasks as adults. Because children’s work is undervalued, the value of labor in general decreases as children work alongside adults in situations of underemployment across urban areas of Africa. In addition to child labor being a key impediment in the long-term struggle to achieve economic development, many children work in extremely hazardous and exploitative situations, presenting an urgent moral challenge. In order to assist these children in escaping the worst forms of abuse, we must understand the economic, cultural, and historical systemic causes of child labor. We must also be willing to distinguish naked exploitation from benign or even useful child labor that adds to household survival and realist workplace training. Merely condemning all child labor equally while blaming poverty generally does nothing to focus limited resources and attention on those children in the worst situations. There remains a need to consider multiple child labor contexts concurrently, to examine patterns across national and ethnic boundaries, and to bring in the voices of children. We need to push the analysis beyond a particular context and think on a comparative level of systems that create and re-create child labor over generations. It is vital to consider how the work of children in one part of Africa is similar to the work of children in another, and to find similarities in their varied contexts that allow us to understand them as a whole. Considering both children’s perspectives and the contexts that frame them clarifies what is expected of children, how their work is useful, and what policies may be sensible in limiting their work while increasing their opportunities.

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Why Study Child Labor in Africa?

What Do We Know About Child Labor in Africa? Child workers in sub-Saharan Africa generally are defined as children of school age who work and do not attend school regularly. This definition makes sense, but it excludes the many child workers who attend school regularly. Thus the numbers of child workers cited throughout this book should be considered underestimates. Empirical findings indicate that roughly 50 percent of working children in sub-Saharan Africa are found in eastern Africa, as shown in Table 1.3. This region includes the relatively populous nations of Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia. Additionally, 33 percent of children in eastern Africa work, compared with 24 percent in western Africa, 22 percent in Middle Africa, and just 5 percent in southern Africa. Figure 1.2 provides a visual picture of the prevalence of ten- to fourteen-year-old workers in sub-Saharan African countries. The highest proportions of children working—40 percent or more—are found in the western African countries of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and the eastern African countries of Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda. The lowest proportions of children working—20 percent or less—are found in southern African countries. Theoretically, concepts and ideas already used to understand women’s work can be applied to understand the work of children. Similar frameworks to those used in explaining the undervalued labor of women vis-à-vis men (i.e., a gender hierarchy) are analogous to the undervalued labor of children vis-à-vis adults (i.e., a socially constructed age hierarchy).7 For example, married Hausa women utilize their children as intermediaries to enable them to engage in market trade and meet household economic

Table 1.3

Children Ten to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force by African Region, 1992

Eastern Africa Western Africa Middle Africa Southern Africa

Number of Working Children

Percentage of African Child Workers

Percentage of Working Children

7,965,000 5,785,000 1,848,000 100,000

50.7 36.9 11.8 0.6

32.9 24.2 21.6 4.6

Sources: Adapted from Christiaan Grootaert and Ravi Kanbur, Child Labor: A Review, Working Paper no. 1454 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1995) and based on International Labour Organization (ILO) and International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), Implementation Report 1992–93 (Geneva: ILO-IPEC, 1993): (1) results of a special ILO questionnaire sent to more than 200 countries and territories in April 1992, (2) the LABORSTAT database, (3) preliminary ILO estimates and projections of the economically active population, and (4) United Nations, Sex and Age Distribution of the World’s Population, 1950–2025 (New York: United Nations Population Division, 1992).

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Child Labor

Figure 1.2

Children Ten to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001

Percentage of Working Children 0–20 21–39 40–100 Data unavailable

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 74–76. Note: Data not available for the Central African Republic, Somalia, Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea, and Liberia. Actual percent range shown in Table 3.1.

needs.8 Also, research from Senegal documents that mothers who are not secluded but overextended with household tasks and childcare consistently benefit economically when they engage their children in market work.9 In these cases, children’s work in the market is an extension of their mothers’ labor, and a vital part of a household economic strategy. In this way, much like women’s work has been theorized as being a secondary or reserve labor, children compose a tertiary force of even more readily available, easily replaceable, cheap labor. There are some generalizations that can be made about child labor in sub-Saharan Africa. Poor children are typically drawn into the labor market. Even though higher rates of poverty are associated with higher rates of child labor, poverty is not the only factor to consider. Agricultural work is the main type of employment for African children. Agricultural work is nei-

Why Study Child Labor in Africa?

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ther highly exploitative nor dangerous, and moreover is typically considered training and essential to a rural household’s budget. The rapid urbanization of Africa since independence patterns divergent levels of income and opportunity across urban and rural areas, and has given birth to new forms of child labor in the urban setting. Urbanization and rural-urban migration set the stage for children to work and live away from their parents with nonkin employers and in positions with higher rates of exploitation. Unfortunately, much of the work of these migrant children is masked by the idiom of kinship. Additionally, the relatively few children who work in the most vulnerable positions—as slaves, bonded laborers, soldiers, or in sex work—tend to have lost contact with their parents and close family members. Depriving children of the labor market without providing adequate replacement income could be detrimental to the well-being of these children. Whether they are poor, orphaned, or casualties of divorce or war, some children must work to survive, even if their work adversely limits future opportunities. In this way, criminalizing child labor only criminalizes poverty, further hindering efforts to address the issue. Finally, these generalizations point to the idea that child labor is varied and not necessarily bad. That said, all forms of child labor have long-term impacts on children’s potential and remain linked to the economic growth and development of their countries. This research attempts to bridge the gap among the various forms of child labor and future outcomes, and to suggest alternative policies that enable rather than limit children’s potential.

Child Labor as a Social Problem When does child labor become defined as a social problem? It is based on age or work conditions, or whether there is a material connection to consumers? If consumers in the richer countries decide to boycott products made by child workers, what does this do to household survival strategies, of which children are an integral part, in poor countries? There may be children working in similar tasks or conditions in different regions of the world, but their work may not always be considered a social problem. In some cases, it may be a social good because children learn a skill or earn money to buy food for the dinner pot. However, if we examine how child labor is patterned as a social problem, we see that it is not age or gender, but work conditions—most prominently, a material connection to Western consumers—that defines children’s economic activities as social issues or problems. Child labor legislation states that light work is acceptable at a certain age, generally fourteen, and that more difficult work should be avoided

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until a child reaches age eighteen. But how can this legislation be enforced when there are children who don’t have birth certificates or know their age in years? Clearly, these laws seem to be drawing on a Western definition of childhood in terms of age, and Western definitions about what work is suitable for children at different life stages. They neglect to consider the austerity that many of these children face on a daily basis. Child labor becomes a social problem when researchers, policymakers, and the media begin to frame it in this regard. In this way, it is socially constructed as an unacceptable situation. Generally, there must be a material connection that links consumers in rich countries with working children in poor countries. People feel compelled to alleviate the problem of children sewing soccer balls or rugs in India because consumers in the West purchase these products. In Africa, this material connection to the West is much weaker, making African child labor part of the “forgotten Africa” syndrome. This also explains why so much research and attention from the popular press has focused on Latin America and Asia, major export regions of textiles and soft manufacturing goods. It is difficult to enjoy watching children play in a local soccer league in Europe knowing that a child in India working in slavelike conditions sewed the soccer ball. Because of the material connection, it has become difficult to ignore child labor. In this way, African children who work on cocoa plantations are atypical in that they have been brought into the fold of the world child labor problem. Again, they share a material connection to the West, as Western consumers ingest substantial amounts of chocolate. The average American consumes over two pounds of chocolate each year, and the average northern European consumes three to four pounds. Children who work on commercial cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire, some of whom are trafficked, provide an interesting example by which to view this phenomenon. Children have worked on these cocoa plantations for decades without notice from the outside world, but only after the British Broadcasting Corporation aired a story about them based on a tip from an international human rights group did the issue come to the fore as a problem to be resolved. Multinational companies expressed concern and country governments got involved. The international uproar over children working on cocoa plantations seems arbitrary, especially as other, more highly exploited workers such as child soldiers and child prostitutes continue to elude the international “social problem” lens. It seems that when attention is focused on the most egregious forms of child labor, it is done more for the human interest shock value than to seek an understanding that might suggest solutions. The fixes proposed generally are shortsighted and temporary rather than attempts to address the underlying conditions that pull children into the labor market. With this emphasis on a material connection or even on the most egre-

Why Study Child Labor in Africa?

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gious forms of child labor, most working African children, like those who work in the agricultural sector or assist in family businesses, have been left out of the definition of problematic child labor. Therefore, they have also been left out of the solution. The chapters that follow consider the many forms of children’s work in sub-Saharan Africa, so that they may be viewed in a comparative and balanced way in terms of what work may mean for children.

Outline of the Book In Chapter 2, I consider whether the cultural and social influences of Africa’s triple heritage—the indigenous, Islamic, and colonial factors first argued by Ali Muzrui—can inform our understanding of child labor in subSaharan Africa. The African perspective presents child labor as vocational education, the Islamic perspective presents child labor in the form of begging as a service in exchange for quranic education, while the colonial perspective values child labor in the context of a monetary economy, with its urbanizing pressures on families to earn currency to pay taxes historically as well as to buy goods and services more recently. I use the shortcomings of the triple heritage to suggest other explanations from the postcolonial period, which are then discussed in the successive chapters. In Chapter 3, I analyze the political economy of children’s work. I examine the effects of large debt service payments and structural adjustment policies, a postcolonial history of corrupt leaders and war, international competition in a global economy, the AIDS pandemic, ineffective child labor legislation, and the fragile state as these factors relate to diminished educational opportunities for children. I compare the national and international child labor legislation by country, allowing one to consider for whose and what purpose child labor laws exist in sub-Saharan Africa. This chapter draws on research completed throughout the continent. In Chapter 4, I examine the variations in children’s work in rural versus urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa. I present urbanization rates historically by country in tabular and map formats, which in turn guides a discussion of the greater opportunities available and different expectations of children in the urban compared with the rural milieu. I explore here as well the key dimensions of household strategies as they relate to whether or not a child is sent into the labor market. These strategies differ markedly across rural and urban backgrounds, and are rooted in the different economies that support rural and urban families. In Chapter 5, I discuss the fundamental conflict of work and school, portraying the educational system as a push factor for children and the labor market as a pull factor. Primary school enrollment rates and adult lit-

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eracy rates are examined as they relate to children’s labor force participation rates. I include the perspectives of children, their parents, and schoolteachers on the value of education, the failure of universal public education, and the difficulty of combining work and school. This chapter includes in-depth case studies from Kenya, Madagascar, and Senegal, and draws on research completed in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. In Chapter 6, I examine the value of children’s work. Ethnographic research and case studies show how various factors coalesce to create this value—gender, age status, spatial relations, the idiom of kinship ties, and parents’ social networks and background. This chapter primarily uses fieldwork from Senegal and Mali in western Africa, and findings from other studies completed in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In Chapter 7, I focus on the most exploitative forms of child labor in sub-Saharan Africa. I discuss children who work as slaves in Niger, Sudan, Mauritania, and Ghana. I profile the trafficked children of western and central Africa in terms of poverty, regional inequality, and how their servitude represents a modern form of slavery. Analyzing reports from the the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees, and the United Nations Children’s Fund, as well as from other human rights organizations, I examine cases of children who have been orphaned, captured, recruited, and thrown away due to wars in western, central, and southern Africa, and cases of children who work in prostitution in eastern Africa. In Chapter 8, I summarize major points, suggest areas of future research, and offer policy recommendations. This chapter also considers what child labor can add to cross-cultural comparative meanings of childhood. Chancellor Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom asserts, “If globalization is to be considered a success, the real test is that the world’s children must become its beneficiaries not its victims.”10 This book seeks to identify some common threads that can help us better understand children’s work, and does not endeavor to homogenize or simplify it. We can learn from children’s varied stories how important their work is, and how we might better address their needs.

Notes 1. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Whittington), “Sub-Saharan Africa.” 2. Bradshaw, “New Directions,” p. 134.

Why Study Child Labor in Africa?

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3. See Challis and Elliman, Child Workers Today; Rodgers and Standing, Child Work, Poverty, and Underdevelopment; Nieuwenhuys, Children’s Lifeworlds; and Schaffer, “Africa English Wireless File.” 4. International Labour Organization (ILO), Economically Active Population Estimates and Projections. 5. World Atlas, Geography IQ. 6. International Labour Organization (ILO), International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labour (SIMPOC), Every Child Counts. 7. Elson, “The Differentiation of Children’s Labor.” See country-level studies in Bass, “Beyond Homework” (Senegal); Callaway, Muslim Hausa Women and Schildkrout, “Dependence and Autonomy” (Nigeria); Katz, “Children and the Environment” and Katz, “Sow What You Know” (Sudan); and Mutiso and Mutuku, “Kenya.” 8. Callaway, Muslim Hausa Women; Schildkrout, “Dependence and Autonomy.” 9. Bass, “Working for Peanuts.” 10. BBC (Whittington), “Sub-Saharan Africa.”

2 The Cultural and Historical Context of Child Labor

The concept we use to talk about child labor, when you look at the many languages in Africa, . . . does not convey any negative perceptions, it seems to be all right.1 Many people assume that child labor is a part of African culture and throw up their hands in resignation, thinking maybe nothing should be done about it while completely ignoring the fact that children worked alongside parents in the United States and the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century. While the concept of child labor has no negative linguistic connotation today in many African countries, as noted in the quotation opening this chapter—a remark made by an officer of the International Labour Organization (ILO)—I’m not convinced that this explains why child labor exists in abundance. Just because children in Africa are more likely to work than children in other cultures and are expected to do more work on average than children in other cultures does not mean that child labor is merely a question of culture. More likely, it is a question of epoch and the level of political economy of a particular society. Whether or not child labor is positively viewed should be considered alongside the definition of childhood for a particular society at a given moment in history. The existence and nature of child labor indicates where a society falls on the demographic and development spectrum. French historian Philippe Ariès first used the idea of childhood as a social and historical construct.2 He believed that children are molded differently by each culture from infancy. Thus, “childhood” does not have the same meaning today as it did 300 years ago in a given culture, and it does not have the same meaning from culture to culture during a given historical moment. Ariès believed that the social experience of childhood differed not only in terms of material conditions, but also in relation to duties, obligations, restraints, and expectations placed upon children. He showed how the

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Child Labor

emergence of the modern conceptualization of childhood as a distinct stage of life was tied to the rise of capitalist ideas of the family, privacy, and individuality between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The concept of childhood, or what it means to be a child, therefore reflects the particularities of a specific sociocultural context. And although other historians have disagreed with certain points made by Ariès,3 there is no disputing the constructed nature of childhood. More recently, sociologists and anthropologists have discussed the existence of distinct forms of childhood that break into two main groups, those based on children’s own experiences and those based on the institutional form of childhood.4 Childhood may differ cross-culturally, but it also differs within particular cultures. Within a culture, the experience of childhood is different and separated (stratified) by factors such as age, gender, class, ethnicity, urban or rural milieu, and even religion. How we define childhood in Africa allows us to understand contemporary child labor. We must consider that historical factors continue to shape what it means to be a child in Africa today.

Considering Africa’s Triple Heritage and the Postcolonial Era Ali Muzrui proposed the triple heritage concept of indigenous/African, Islamic, and colonial influences to frame contemporary African societies in his television series The Africans. People living in sub-Saharan Africa may be divided roughly into thirds by religion: those who follow religions indigenous to Africa, those who follow Islam, and those who follow Christian religions that took hold during the colonial era. These factors reshape cultural values, the meaning of education, and what a society teaches its young. In this chapter I consider how these three strands of influence have shaped child labor in sub-Saharan African societies. I also analyze the shortcomings of the triple heritage to explain the current work situation for children. From this, I consider more recent societal changes such as urbanization, democratization, and transformations in the extendedfamily structure that define childhood and children’s work in sub-Saharan Africa. Table 2.1 and Figure 2.1 show the relative cultural influences of African, Islamic, and Christian religions by country. The maps depict geographically that traces of the distinct eras of ruling powers and influence in Africa historically remain today, despite the overlay of postcolonial Africa since 1960. While African religions coincide with Islamic and Christian religious practices throughout the continent, African religions have been eclipsed by Islam in western Africa and the Horn, and have been similarly outpaced by Christianity in central, eastern, and southern Africa. These

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The Cultural and Historical Context Table 2.1

Religious and Cultural Influences in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1998 African (%)

Angola Benin Botswana Burkina Faso Burundi Cameroon Central African Republic (CAR) Chad Congo, Democratic Republic (DRC) Congo, Republic (Brazzaville) Côte d’Ivoire Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Ethiopia Gabon Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Kenya Lesotho Liberia Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritania Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda Senegal Sierra Leone Somalia South Africa Sudan Swaziland Tanzania Togo Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

47 50 50 40 23 40 24 25 10 48 15 9 9 12 25 1 38 7 50 26 20 40 52 5 9 0 50 15 9 10 7 6 30 0 29 25 30 20 59 18 1 49

Muslim (%) 0 20 0 50 10 20 15 50 10 2 27 0 40 48 1 90 30 85 45 7 0 20 7 20 90 100 20 0 80 50 10 92 60 90 2 70 10 35 12 16 17 1

Christian (%) 53 30 50 10 67 40 50 25 70 50 34 90 40 38 65 9 24 8 5 66 80 40 41 75 1 0 30 85 9 40 87 2 10 9 68 5 60 45 29 66 63 25

Source: Estimates taken from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2001 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001). Note: The midpoint is used for a reported range estimate.

three religious influences are not mutually exclusive. In some cases, there is a synthesis of two religions. For example, a child may wear a gris-gris of coffer shells that draw on indigenous beliefs to ward off illness while at the same time attending an Islamic or Catholic school.

18 Figure 2.1

Child Labor Religious and Cultural Influences in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1998

African Religion

Christian Religion

Muslim Religion

Percentage of Influence 0–10 11–39 40–100 Data unavailable

Source: Estimates from U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2001 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001).

Several countries in western Africa, such as Togo, Guinea-Bissau, Benin, and to a lesser extent Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Congo-Brazzaville, have retained indigenous African belief systems. Islam has a weighty influence in western African countries such as

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Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Mali, Niger, and countries bordering the Sahara, such as Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea. The colonial/Christian legacy is heavily felt in central, eastern, and southern African countries such as Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea. If we concentrate on Africa’s triple heritage, we may overlook the postcolonial factors—such as class and ethnic inequality, the adverse consequences of structural adjustment policies, and urbanization—that affect the meaning of childhood and our conceptualizations of child labor in subSaharan Africa. Most conceptualizations adopt a Western ideal of childhood, which, unfortunately, is historically and culturally specific. Much like economic globalization, there has also been a globalization of Western concepts of childhood. In the postcolonial era, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, charitable agencies, and international nongovernmental organizations in the Third World continue to push for a particular vision of “correct childhood.”5 Adopting this particular vision obfuscates the complex, socially constructed character of the child upon which it rests.6 Indeed, scholars increasingly recognize that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child uses privileged and idealized Western concepts of childhood.7 There are efforts to use other definitions of childhood based on local cultural constructs rather than the Western ideal. These local cultural constructs tend to situate a child within an impoverished context. The researcher may then ask about the meaning of child labor for these children and their economically constrained families. However, a fixation on the present often ignores the disruptive impact of the history of colonialism in these communities.8 Other historical epochs may continue to influence how childhood is defined in contemporary Africa. The historical context provides a useful starting point for us to think about child labor in sub-Saharan Africa. A punctuated historical confluence provides a description of the segmentation of the epochs that frame children’s work today. While there are distinct periods of power and influence in Africa’s history, each of these persists as a synthesis occurring over time and shaping children’s work today. In the following sections I synthesize what scholars have found across the eras suggested by Africa’s triple heritage, and then consider research that focuses on the postcolonial period.

Indigenous Cultures and Child Labor One famous study of children in six cultures found that African children carried out more household tasks than children from the five other cultures.

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Kenyan children, ages three to eleven years old, performed a greater number of chores on average than children from Mexico, the Philippines, Japan, India, and the United States.9 While not comprehensive, this study sets African children’s work experiences apart from a cross section of child labor around the world. More than in the other cultures studied, children’s work in Africa was found to be an accepted part of childhood. The following subsections explore how indigenous cultures shape ideas about children’s work as part of household sustenance and production and as part of education and social reproduction, as well as how indigenous cultures shape ideas about children’s work expectations by gender.

Children’s Work as Part of Household Production In general, the African context presents us with a household framework in which children’s work is used to benefit the parents and the extended family network, to secure sustenance and training opportunities for its members. In the indigenous or African context, child labor is vocational education in the rural setting. There is a long history of children’s agricultural and domestic work in many parts of Africa. This pattern is not unique to Africa, for it characterized the colonial American family and European families prior to the nineteenth century. Generally, children’s training and education are by-products of their work, especially in rural areas. The Tallensi people of northern Ghana share a small-scale farming society that maintains organization through a system of patrilineal clans and lineages.10 Training of the young in the rural area is not systematic, as one might see in an urban African school today, but occurs as a by-product of the cultural routine. The family and kinsfolk are responsible for providing it, and it is conducted in a practical way during “actual situations of daily life.”11 Tale children feel ownership of their agricultural work and learn practical skills that allow the community to continue providing for itself in the next generation much as it had in the past.12 For example, one researcher recounts the following vignette: I was walking with Samane and his two small sons (8 to 9 years) across a recently sown field of early millet already a few inches high. I chanced to tread on a shoot. Immediately one of the small boys stooped and carefully raised and replanted the blade of millet. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “Don’t you know that is our food?” he replied reproachfully.13 The Tale children begin economic duties and activities when they are five to six years old. Boys and girls are taught their adult social and work roles through active play and through assisting their parents. Boys six to nine

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years old play imaginative cattle-herding and house-building games, and girls six to nine years old play housekeeping games. At the same time, they begin to assist their parents in these work activities, and by the time boys and girls are nine to twelve years old they are fully responsible for these same tasks.14 Other research from Ghana describes children who begin work at an early age and add tasks as they mature: Children begin to learn to help in house and farm at a comparatively early age, from five years onwards, tasks usually being commensurate with their ability and size. Their services are in many cases indispensable, for, by carrying out the more monotonous, time-consuming tasks such as bird-scaring, cattle-herding, babytending, they give their parents and guardians leisure to pursue their specialist activities; to attend market or just to do more arduous chores.15 Likewise, Nigerian children’s activities among the Yoruba ethnic group involve rural children doing useful work at an early age in preparation for adult work roles: Sons encourage daddy by going on errands willingly; they buy clothes, palm wine, medicine and bring clothes when needed, and send firewood. They help mother bring vegetables from the farm, fetch firewood and bring water when she needs it. Daughters can help father carry yams from the farm and they are usually helpful during the cocoa season in removing beans from the cocoa pods, help mother in the kitchen and help her sell things in the market.16 Research on subsistence agricultural societies undergoing change to a more capitalist production model shows that the reproduction of knowledge from parents to children becomes less important. Similar to the Tallensi of northern Ghana, knowledge about the environment was taught to children during childhood socialization in rural Sudan. Research from a Sudanese village has documented the process by which a rural economy underwent the shift from subsistence agriculture to wage work as a result of a development project.17 Prior to changes in the economy, children played games wherein they imitated their parents’ social and work activities associated with growing agricultural crops. In this case, the political economy and the local environment both underwent change, which in turn spurred change in the reproduction of knowledge and social relations. During the transition, children’s education shifted from play and participation in the work of their community to formal schooling away from their households. As a result,

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work, play, and learning became distinct, specialized processes rather than a part of informal social reproduction of knowledge from the parents’ generation to that of the children. Overall, children have had a long history of agricultural and domestic work in many parts of Africa.18 Children’s work is often vocational education, especially when children work alongside their parents. This work, today found more often among rural children, takes the form of informal training and socialization as children learn their adult roles. Teaching children their future work roles during play and as a part of primary socialization by parents has also served to reproduce African societies over time. In the case of the development project that changed the subsistence agricultural environment in Tanzania, once capitalist forces entered the community, the balance and continuity across generations were changed.

Children’s Work as Education and Social Reproduction During Childhood In addition to education, child labor in Africa is often viewed in terms of instilling responsibility and knowledge of a trade or way of life. Rather than engender a negative association, child labor in Africa presents itself historically as a means of social reproduction and useful training for children. That said, this reality more correctly describes the rural rather than the urban sentiment. It is difficult to evaluate the indigenous contributions to urban children’s work in sub-Saharan Africa today. While substantial cities, such as Timbuktu, Kano, and Zimbabwe, have existed historically in Africa, there is no written record of children’s work in these urban contexts and most urbanization has taken place in sub-Saharan Africa since the early 1960s. Most children who work in urban areas are recent migrants from a rural area or are the children of parents who have migrated to the urban area. Child labor can be argued to be a vital part of childhood among rural, subsistence agricultural communities historically in Africa. Child labor also represents a vital part of overall production in rural areas. Parents have many children because they can be economically useful. As rural economies become more diversified and cash-based, as was evident in the study of one Sudanese village discussed above, children’s work may become less important as a socializing and informal educating agent in the rural context. The fostering of children is an African cultural tradition that lends itself to the socialization and training of children. Most of children’s urban work, such as the apprenticeship system for boys and the domestic work of girls, are natural extensions of the indigenous system of education. Alain Morice found that apprentices compose 85 percent of the labor force in the

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leather industry in Nigeria.19 Children are often fostered by the parents to extended family members, religious leaders, and even to strangers in urban areas. At times, the fostering employer shares only a tacit relationship to people of the rural village of a child. However, parents seek out these fostering work relationships to provide training opportunities for children and future migration opportunities for other family members. Additionally, if a child can gain a foothold in the urban area, this is viewed as positive for the entire family because others may follow and send back remittances. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, fostering can leave children in potentially exploitative situations with little parental supervision.

The Separation of Children’s Work by Gender The gender stratification process framing children’s work and earning potential has its roots in a history of African patriarchy, and often has overlays of Islamic teachings or colonial patriarchy. The stratification by gender provides the framework by which work and social lives are largely separated by sex. A gender stratification system based on sex differentiation causes women to experience their work and everyday lives differently than do men. This separation of work by gender has implications for boys and girls who work for their mothers. Children who work in subsistence agriculture in Zimbabwe are often invisible and obscured because their work is directed by women. Research shows that Zimbabwean women’s work is often unmeasured and unaccounted for.20 In other cases, women’s work is undermeasured and underremunerated. Using this same logic, working urban children in Senegal find the value of their labor diminished because it is regularly considered to be an extension of women’s work. Boys who work for their mothers are found to face the same gender stratification system as girls if they are performing feminine work that is generally done or supervised by women.21 The hierarchy of male over female is also reproduced in the socialization of children. Feminist scholars have used the concept of social reproduction to refer to the relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and from one generation to the next.22 Through social reproduction, the female role is maintained as subordinate to that of the male. For example, the rural Pare people of northern Tanzania pass on knowledge of agricultural production and gender-specific roles to their children. Five-year-old children begin to assist adults in tending cash crops and other income-generating activities.23 While there is little division of labor by sex among young children, when they reach age eight or nine boys begin carrying heavier items such as water or fodder for animals while girls are taught to wash clothes, cook, and watch younger siblings. Also, girls’ workload increases with age and boys’ workload decreases. Girls are con-

24

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sidered to be equal to adults in their work and social lives by age twelve, while boys reach this same status by age fourteen. 24 Again in western Africa through social reproduction, parents teach their children the social norms that generally offer boys higher status and more opportunity than the norms afforded to girls. 25 Research on urban Senegalese child market workers shows that children’s sex largely patterns the different types of work available to boys and girls and how children come to participate in market work.26 The gender division of labor has a more deleterious effect on wages for children than for women. Theories on household labor contend that the influx of women and children into the labor market drives wages down. Because women’s income is considered to be secondary to their husbands’ income for their households, women’s wages are always lower than those of their male counterparts and further deterioration of all wages occurs.27 While research generally lumps children’s and women’s work together as belonging to the same category of unskilled, cheap labor, I believe that children represent a tertiary class of worker who are valued even less in the labor market due to their work being seen as an extension of, and subordinate to, women’s work. Recent research on child labor likewise describes children as an ever-expanding and even “so cheap as to be disposable” class of worker.28

Islam and Child Labor In the seventh century the Arabs began making inroads into sub-Saharan Africa, passing through either Egypt or northern Africa. The movement of Islam into eastern Africa was earlier and swifter than its penetration into western Africa. By the ninth century, raids had begun in eastern Africa, and by the thirteenth century, Islam had secured a foothold.29 Thus, even before Vasco da Gama arrived in 1498, the Islamic faith had been established in many places in Africa. A common denominator of eastern African coastal culture is the Swahili language, which has borrowed linguistically from Arabic. Since the fifteenth century, European expansion into eastern Africa gave birth to the politics of Christian versus Islam in the Horn of Africa.30 Both Islam and Christianity brought literacy. Some rulers used Islam to fortify and extend their power. For example, the literate merchant class of the kingdom of Sennar in present-day Sudan reunited a large swath of land and intensified the Islamic cultural influence. Eventually, Islam replaced Christianity as the state religion along the Nile. Islam came to western Africa by the tenth century with the transSaharan trade in gold and salt.31 Those south of the Sahara desired salt

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while those to the north desired gold. In time, western African traders converted to Islam to strengthen business transactions. An account of Mansa Kankan Musa of the Mali empire in 1324, who passed through Cairo en route to Mecca, attests to the early conversion of western African elites to Islam.32 However, the peasantry in the savanna of western Africa remained deeply involved in African religious rituals and adhered to Islam lightly until the nineteenth century. Islamic holy wars, or jihads, then transformed societies and cultures in the central savanna of western Africa. The Moors of Mauritania, the Tuareg of the middle Sahara, and the savanna Fulbe interacted easily with one another and initiated jihads. Their heads established themselves as the focal point of the new ruling class in many regions of western Africa where the jihads were successful. Today, Islam is a major influence. Over 40 percent of the population across the Saharan desert belt, stretching from western Africa to the savanna to the Horn, are Muslim. While child labor is not specifically discussed in the Quran, work as service to obtain an Islamic education can be attributed to the Islamic influence. Also, children’s work as a response to the shrouding and secluding of women from public life can be attributed to the Islamic influence.

Child Labor as Service, Education, and Exploitation The Islamic context presents children’s begging as a service in exchange for quranic education in Senegal and Gambia, and to a lesser extent in bordering countries. Referred to as talibes in Senegal or almudos in Gambia, these child workers are male and range from seven to thirteen years old.33 Their parents place them for some years with a marabout, or quranic teacher, in order to learn the teachings of Allah. The children divide their time between begging and studying the Quran. Usually, they give their proceeds from begging to the teacher. A 1992 study by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that roughly six in ten talibes gave their marabouts an average of 100 CFA francs (about U.S.$1) per day. 34 However, if the alms consist of food, the talibes may consume it. The quranic teacher is expected to educate and look after them. Generally, these children carry the appearance of extreme poverty. Most talibes in urban areas belong to the Tidiane brotherhood, whereas most rural talibes are Mouride.35 The Mourides in rural areas use talibe students to help grow and harvest the peanut crop.36 By begging, talibes fill the need of an important feature of Muslim religious practice. For centuries, Muslims have had the responsibility to engage in zakat, or almsgiving, one of the five pillars of Islam. The begging of talibes has its origins in the eleventh-century practices of Muslim clerics in Senegal. Clerics traveled in groups after completing their quranic

26

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training and begged each morning for food and sustenance. From this, a class of people arose who resided in towns and refused to engage in occupations regarded as degrading, namely anything other than the study of Islam. In addition, almsgiving is thought to ensure that the giver will be provided for in the future and to secure a place in paradise. The early practice of begging coupled with current views on almsgiving helps to explain why begging is considered socially acceptable and useful today. Zakat involves giving to the needy, including beggars. Thus, giving is an act of worship—a way of thanking Allah for the material well-being one has attained. While Muslims may choose for themselves to whom they give and the form the giving should take, talibes are likely recipients in western Africa. These children are needy and are also engaged in a pious activity as students of the Quran. Begging is believed to instill a sense of humility and discipline in the child. Research documents that talibes in urban markets beg for five to eleven hours per day.37 Children practice their lessons and receive religious instruction for two to six hours per day, depending on the marabout. Other research corroborates these findings, noting that talibes spend about twice as much time begging as they spend in class.38 With some marabouts, the child will learn to read and transcribe quranic teachings. With other marabouts, a modicum of instruction is given to free up time for the more profitable begging. While most marabouts have less than ten talibes, some marabouts in Dakar have as many as one hundred. UNICEF estimates that there are 50,000 to 100,000 talibes in Senegal alone, which would amount to as much as 3 percent of all children under age fifteen, a considerable proportion. Most of these children “come from low income, illiterate families.”39 Thus it is not surprising that for a mix of economic and religious reasons, poor families send their children to live with marabouts. Some of these children may go home or a parent may visit them at their daara, or religious school, once or twice a year during the six to seven years of training, but there are other children who lose contact with their families. Talibes are vulnerable to exploitation for obvious reasons. They are children, separated from their immediate and extended families, who spend considerable time on the street begging for food and money.40 They are in the exclusive custody of one person, their teacher, for long periods of time. Talibes are generally no longer a part of the household strategy of their parents. The marabout is expected to provide the basic needs of the child— food, an Islamic education, and housing. Generally, an urban marabout provides one or just a few cooked meals per week for his talibes. Likewise, the quality of housing provided by marabouts varies widely, and there is no oversight. Here is the experience of a talibe living in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal:

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Mbay Dionne is a ten-year-old Sereer boy from the village of Khombole, near Louga. Mbay is Sereer and a part of the Tidiane brotherhood. His father is dead, but was a farmer by occupation and also a talibe as a child. He does not know anything about his paternal grandparents and does not know them personally. His mother lives in the village and keeps the house. He does not know his maternal grandparents either. His father had just one wife. He is the second of five children, with one older brother and two younger brothers and one younger sister. Mbay sleeps in the quranic school, where there are sometimes three or four students in the same room. He lives in the Parcelles Assaines suburb of Dakar without electricity, a radio, or a television. He uses candles for light at night. Mbay begs for his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He gets water from a faucet about 200 meters from the daara. Mbay has only received the quranic schooling provided by the marabout and has had no public formal education. A normal day begins with begging from 7 to 10 A.M. He learns the Quran from about 10:30 in the morning until noon. Mbay explains, “We recite verses, after we write a new verse we then go beg for lunch.” At noon, he goes to beg for his lunch, which is gathered in a piecemeal fashion from one market vendor to the next. He naps and learns to write in Arabic during the afternoon, and then goes to beg for his dinner and coins from 6 until 8 P.M. Thus, Mbay learns to recite and then write one verse from the Quran per day.41 In order of importance, the begging labor of this child is clearly first and his instruction and nourishment rank second and a distant third. Mbay’s labor serves two functions within the Islamic cultural context. First, the almsgiving provides for those who are in need, which is functional for regional Islamic religious practices. Second, this child may be an orphan, as are many talibes, who has been entrusted to a religious leader for rearing and safekeeping. Some marabouts provide education and sustenance to the best of their means, while others find that having talibes can be lucrative, especially if the educational and sustenance aspects are neglected in favor of the begging work of their charges. The exploitation of these children does not occur in isolated incidents. Most talibe children are not provided with an adequate level of food, clothing, shelter, and education. Talibe labor should be included among the most exploitative forms of child labor, because a substantial number of these children are offered very little education and are exploited for their moneymaking potential by marabouts. Children who remain attached to their families in both rural and urban

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areas are the least likely to be found in highly exploitative begging arrangements. The veneer of Islam legitimates begging by Muslim children and insulates it from criticism, especially in a society where 90 percent of the population are Muslim. The functionality of these boys’ efforts is emphasized along with the service provided. Most of them come from destitute families in rural areas and no longer have contact with their families in the rural areas. For many, their fathers are dead. These boys, especially those who study and beg in urban areas, typically live a miserable life of deprivation, chronic hunger, and poverty. While they are expected to memorize and interpret the Quran, these children can hardly differentiate between left and right.42 A study of children working on the street during the day in Gambia found that talibes had less education on average than other children working on the street, such as street vendors, shoe shiners, contractual laborers, and sectarian beggars. In 1994, just 9 percent of talibes had been to school compared with roughly one-third of all other street children.43 Specifically, 37 percent of street vendors, 24 percent of shoe shiners, 47 percent of laborers, and 27 percent of those in other occupations had ever attended school.44 With respect to food consumption, living conditions, and work environment, the talibes were found to be the most disadvantaged of the street children. A growing number of people in western Africa view the life of these religious beggars as unjust. These are children from poor families, generally unaccompanied by parents, who increasingly find sympathy among urban social activists. A film called Xarek Maral a Almodou by Amadou Thior, shown at the 2003 biannual FESPACO West African film festival, detailed the misery of a Muslim beggar child. These children do not appear anywhere else in the Islamic world outside western Africa. Their existence represents a melding of the western African tradition of having itinerant Islamic teachers known as marabouts, the practice of almsgiving, and a harsh social and economic milieu.

Children’s Work as Women’s Survival Strategy Children’s work is a significant part of household economic strategy among the Hausa in northern Nigeria. Because of the division of labor by age and sex in the Hausa society in Kano, women adhering to purdah, or the seclusion of married Muslim women, are barred from public participation in market work. They use their children as intermediaries in order to engage in market work and earn income, which in turn increases their power within the household.45 In Hausaland, married Muslim women utilize their children as intermediaries so that they may engage in market trade and meet

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household economic needs. In this way, these women sidestep Islamic cultural norms of seclusion that limit their activities to the home.46 Hausa children help maintain the system of purdah. According to conservative interpretations of Islamic teachings, women and children are considered to be economically dependent on men, and purdah is based on the premise that men will provide the material needs of women and children in their household. The economic dependency at the kinship level resulting from this ideology strengthens the importance of family and marriage. Rural and poor urban women increasingly resolve their needs to generate income and remain secluded by participating in the market economy through their children. Even though restricted, women can use their children or neighborhood children to serve as street traders and messengers. With children’s help, “Women sell cooked food outside their houses, and may invest in other commodities such as detergent, kola nuts, sugar, salt, fruit—just about anything that can be transported on a tray and sold in small quantities.”47 Because children are integrated into market trading early in life, they set up their own businesses in which they keep the profits. In these cases, children are selling to other children. “By ten, many girls cook for sale on their own. With initial help from their mothers, or other adult female relatives, who may give them a cooking pot, charcoal, or a small stove, they purchase small amounts of ingredients and prepare various snack foods. These are then sold in very small quantities to other children.”48 When universal primary education has been advocated, Hausa culture has resisted it, because increasing school enrollment threatens women’s ability to generate income and the institution of purdah. In this way, children’s work can be viewed as complementary for maintaining purdah and the roles of adults in socioeconomic and family relations. Few Hausa object to the long-term potential of formal schooling, but they do resist the perceived short-term consequences—“very often based upon those very realistic appraisals of its immediate socio-economic consequences.” 49 Only through children’s work can these adult gender distinctions and this way of life be maintained.

The Functionality of Child Labor In western Africa, the Islamic context reinforces the functionality of child labor. Among the talibes or almudos, begging work is a necessary part of socialization and education. At the local level, in theory, it provides for an impoverished child to be taken in, cared for, reared, and prepared for adult life. Among the Hausa, children’s market and outside commercial work allows for them and adults to serve complementary roles, allows the separation of women’s roles from those of men, and allows the institution of

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purdah to be maintained. For the Hausa, any efforts to get children into schools and out of the work force will need to address the consequences for women and their incomes. Both talibe and Hausa children who work for their mothers do so as a result of Islamic religious practices in western Africa. The local definition of childhood takes distinct forms through Islam and includes child labor as a major component.

The Colonial Christian Context and Child Labor A majority of Third World countries are former colonies of Europe. Colonial governments assumed that African societies could replicate the European development model of industrialization. In the late 1800s in subSaharan Africa, Christianity accompanied the colonial yoke as part of Western cultural training. What is expected of children today has been affected by several colonial influences, most notably the spread of capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, and modern or Western cultural ideas.50 Exploration in the 1800s had established that the continent was rich in natural resources and labor, so much so that King Leopold II of Belgium referred to securing a “slice of this magnificent African cake.”51 European governments became more involved in Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, a meeting hosted by Otto Von Bismarck to decide which European powers would have authority over contentious territory of the African continent to avoid future conflict between European governments. The Berlin Conference did not partition all of Africa, but did solve several conflicting claims to territory and set the precedent for deciding the matters of Africa in Europe. With European involvement, the three ideals of nationhood, industrialization, and Westernization, which meant Christianity, were introduced. Christian missionaries started traveling to Africa to spread the good word. Similar to Islam, Christianity brought literacy and more formalized types of education. The missionaries sought to impose a new morality at the same time that colonial governments tried to impose new economic and political systems designed to extract natural resources and use indigenous labor for European gain. Many times their aims were complementary, as the mission stations in Zimbabwe demonstrate (discussed below), because both hoped to superimpose new values and systems over the previous cultures. In this way, ideas dating to the colonial period continue to shape how childhood and children’s roles are defined in African societies today.

Colonialism and Nation-State Instability Prior to European involvement, most Africans identified with an ethnic group or village, with an emphasis on subsistence living—not nationhood

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or industrialization. It was not until the late 1880s that the term “Africans” came into use. Europeans forced the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa to observe frontiers that later became the basis for countries. The nation-state system used in Europe was forced upon African peoples often with the use of the gun, trickery, and force based on the wishes of Europeans rather than the needs of Africans. For example, present-day Guinea had its boundaries drawn arbitrarily by the French with little regard to separate ethnic groups or the limits of natural regions. A historian notes, “They were shaped . . . by the chances of conquest or of compromise between colonial powers.”52 Many of the people of Guinea’s rural areas are actually attached to other nation-states. There is a long tradition of international migration between Guinea and cities of Senegal and between Guinea and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, including children who migrate from rural areas to learn a vocational trade or selling activities. Their international migration appears to benefit them, but is a source of contention among these country governments today. The Senegalese economy barely provides for its own citizens, and is further burdened by the migrant influx. Momadou’s story provides an apt example: “Momadou, a ten-year-old Guinean and apprentice to a tailor, works in an all-male shop. He came to Senegal in 1994 with his uncle, a meat salesman in the market. Momadou’s parents reside in Conakry, Guinea. His uncle placed Momadou in the customary ten-year-long tailoring apprenticeship” in Dakar. Momadou’s “uncle” came to Senegal twenty years ago.53 Many of the civil wars in the postcolonial period have resulted in part from the boundaries established by European powers.54 The Somali people were split between their country and Kenya. In the same manner, the Masai nation was split between Kenya and Tanzania. Artificial states were created elsewhere too. Nigeria has four principal peoples, the Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, and Fulani, each with a different belief system, under one flag. Nigeria suffered a terrible war in the 1960s, and even today the Muslim Hausa in the north hold views particularly divergent from those of the government in the south of the country. Likewise, the Wolof people, who live predominantly in Senegal and are the largest ethnic group there, are also found in Mauritania and Gambia in substantial numbers. The Wolof in Mauritania have been a source of conflict because they are discriminated against by Berber descendants, the majority population. The boundaries that created Senegal and Gambia were drawn to resolve a dispute over water access between two colonial powers, Britain and France, and not to accommodate local needs. As a result, the Wolof people were split over colonial borders that resulted in independent nation-states during the 1960s. Conflict and instability continue in many countries today, such as Sudan, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. The instability of nation-states in sub-Saharan Africa results

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Child Labor

in governments spending money to maintain power rather than to create infrastructure or provide hospitals, schools, and public services. In 1995, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Sudan, and Botswana spent 5 to 7 percent of gross national product (GNP) on military expenditures.55 In the period 1990–1994, 40 percent of the Ethiopian government’s budget went to defense spending, compared with 3 percent to healthcare and 12 percent to education. In the DRC (formerly Zaire) over this same period, the government of Mobutu Sese Seko spent 14 percent of its budget on defense while allocating less than 1 percent for healthcare and 2 percent for education. 56 When governments choose to invest in military spending over human capital, the opportunity consequences to these other areas become dire. An increase of just 5 percent of GNP to educational spending for all of these countries would significantly bolster literacy rates and human capital development.

Cash Crops and Child Labor Sometimes people wonder how it is that a country like Côte d’Ivoire can produce a nonedible crop such as cocoa but at the same time have difficulty feeding its people. The answer to this question involves two factors: colonialism and the introduction of cash crops. The European colonial powers in sub-Saharan Africa, most notably France and Britain, expanded indigenous agriculture to include cash crops geared to the wants of European consumers and industries. 57 The production of these cash crops for export depended upon plantation and sharecropper systems. Britain organized the commercial production of cocoa in Ghana, wool and coffee in Kenya, and tea in Zimbabwe. France arranged for the production of peanuts in Senegal and Mali, and cocoa and bananas in Côte d’Ivoire. The economic shift toward cash crops significantly decreased the production of goods for local food needs and at the same time destroyed indigenous handicraft industries. The kingdom of Buganda, in what has been Uganda since 1894, provides a good example. Once Bugandan peasants were forced by British colonists to produce cotton and coffee for export, the local barkcloth and pottery crafts disappeared.58 Likewise, people began working in mines, fields, and plantations for export production in order to pay household or hut taxes and retain access to land. As a consequence, indigenous societies lost local cultural knowledge and agricultural production for local food needs declined. Indigenous labor and resources were used to sustain and develop European urban and industrial needs. Throughout Africa, colonial governments sought to use children in mining and commercial agriculture, and even separated children from their parents. While most of children’s mining work has disappeared in southern

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33

Africa, children continue to work in plantation and commercial agriculture. In Zimbabwe, the current work of children on coffee and tea estates while attending “earn-and-learn” schools is one example that dates to the colonial era.59 During that era, children worked for their upkeep and were supposed to receive basic food and shelter, and perhaps an education, in return. More recently, there has been a mixed debate on the usefulness of these schools. On the one hand, it has been argued that children do not always gain the educative outcomes promised in return for exploitative work. On the other, it has been argued that employment is important for the livelihood of these children. While work for children may seem unacceptable in a more affluent society, it represents a real option for children with limited resources and a lack of alternative opportunities.

The Invisible Nature of Children’s Work Most of the commercial labor of children remains unseen, as their work is often subsumed under that of a parent. The roots of this invisibility date to the colonial era. Historical research on colonial labor practices in South Africa and Zimbabwe demonstrates how the colonizers used traditional African teachings to exploit the labor of Africans.60 In both South Africa and Zimbabwe, historical research shows that allowing parents to maintain control of their children’s work preserved precapitalist, kin-ordered modes of production. Because children’s work was generally considered to be that of the household head, it was invisible to labor statistics during the colonial era.61 The historical research on child labor in South African agricultural, mining, and domestic service industries shows that children’s uncounted and unremunerated labor dates to colonialism and to slavery.62 During the apartheid era in South Africa, children were exploited for their free or cheap labor.63 The process whereby youths work in unremunerated apprenticeships in exchange for learning a craft dates to 1658 and the Dutch East India Company. Indeed, early Dutch slave owners believed that slavery was a way to save children from a worse fate.64 In colonial Zimbabwe, white commercial farmers retained the family model of precapitalist agricultural production to increase the productivity of their coffee and tea farms.65 Commercial farmers hired entire families to work on plantations, and children were expected to perform the same amount of labor for the employer as they would for their parents. A male head of household, generally the father, gained prestige by the amount of labor, which included that of both women and children, he could provide. He also directly supervised children’s labor time. These factors served to increase production for the capitalist farmer while devaluing the labor of children and leaving their work largely invisible to written records. This

34

Child Labor

practice of clumping the work of children under a parental figure continues today in Zimbabwe in commercial farming.66 In colonial Zimbabwe, historical research notes that children were recruited to meet labor shortages. Several laws, such as the legislation that created the labor tenancy system, certain provisions of the Masters and Servants Act of 1899, and the tax and pass laws, were passed to encourage the work of African children.67 The labor tenancy system provided a head of household with land in exchange for making the labor of his dependents (wives, children, younger siblings, and servants) available to the farm owner. The Masters and Servants Act allowed a father, mother, or guardian to apprentice his or her child, if under the age of sixteen, to a “proper person” until the child reached age eighteen. Youths over age sixteen could apprentice themselves and remain bonded until age eighteen. African families were subject to new taxes in colonial Zimbabwe that required work for wages in the monetary economy. Often, it was only through the addition of cash from their children’s labor that parents could pay their taxes. Likewise in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) during the colonial period, the idiom of kinship allowed the work of children to go uncounted in employment statistics,68 much like the work of women. What is known about children’s and women’s work in the colonial context is apparent only through analysis of archival materials wherein authorities discussed the problems that resulted from women’s migration. Work was often seen as a way to train or help children under the aegis of fostering, so they and the value they produced were not tabulated. However, children worked in substantial numbers and likely made substantial contributions. For example, miners’ children in Zambia were hired as sweepers, or picannins, in the mines, to such an extent that in 1940 in one mining community only half of all children attended formal school. Based on research on selected mining communities, it is likely that children were hired en masse alongside their parents during the colonial era.

The Missionary Influence Colonial rule forced European ideas of administration and education on African cultures. These were often accompanied with missionary efforts to spread Christianity and Western morals to African peoples. The African perspective is well represented by the postcolonial saying, “When the white man came he had the Bible and we had the land. When the white man left we had the Bible and he had the land.” This saying reflects how indigenous peoples lost control of their material and natural resources during the colonial era, in many cases resulting in an upheaval of indigenous class systems and cultures.69 The forced social changes resulting from European colonialism are

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35

well demonstrated in Chinua Achebe’s 1959 novel Things Fall Apart, which depicts life among the Igbo before and after the arrival of missionaries and the British colonial government in a Nigerian village. Substantial social disorganization resulted when children were forced to attend missionary schools that taught values opposed to those of their parents. In the end, the indigenous family and community structures fell apart as children left to take jobs outside the village in the colonial administration. In colonial Zimbabwe, it was common for mission stations to combine mission schools and commercial farming. Missionaries were granted choice pieces of land by the colonial government. If an African household head agreed to a tenancy agreement, he and his family were allowed to remain on their land, which had become mission land, or to move onto mission land. These agreements required African families to convert to Christianity and send their children to a mission school. The mission schools were not free—families had to pay fees in cash, cattle, or student labor—and they varied in academic rigor. One report of a mission school indicated only a modicum of literary instruction.70 When mission schools were established, most African children were not attending school of any type. At the same time, the mission schools were not accessible to most children of colonial Zimbabwe, and most girls were not allowed to attend school at all, missionary or otherwise, because of popular thought that education would make them “hard to control.” Historical accounts indicate that missions provided schooling in situations where it was also economically lucrative in terms of commercial agriculture. Missionaries benefited from the labor of children in exchange for providing a religious education, not an empowering secular education. Similarly in western Africa, young women of certain ethnic groups worked as domestic helpers for missionaries. In Senegal, rural girls from the Sereer ethnic group worked as maids for missionaries during the colonial era. Likewise, girls and young women from the Dioula ethnic group first worked away from their families as domestic helpers for missionaries in the south of Senegal. Over time, young women began seeking work outside their communities, creating a more general stream of migrant domestic laborers. This same pattern of paid household labor and labor migration continues today as young Sereer and Dioula women seek domestic work in urban areas.

Increased Production In the colonial context, child labor was valuable in the new monetary economy imposed on indigenous cultures. Within this economy, African families were forced to earn currency to pay taxes slated to fund industrialization and development. They employed their children to gain or retain

36

Child Labor

access to farmland through new tenancy systems imposed by colonial rule. Therefore the missionaries were often given land to in turn use to extract labor from African household heads. The availability of land for white missionaries and settlers to British colonies of settlement, such as Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, provided the rules and circumstances that resulted in the free labor of children alongside that of the household head. During the colonial period, “childhood” was defined by the colonial government, and schools were often introduced as a way of extracting the labor of children for commercial agriculture. Children today, who work for free or under the labor of their parents in commercial agriculture, should be viewed as a part of this colonial legacy. In the early 1990s in postcolonial Zimbabwe, white commercial farmers continued to use the cheap and free labor of African children. African commercial farmers replaced these white farmers in the late 1990s, but they continue to use the labor of children. Farmers have succeeded in lobbying the Ministry of Education and Culture to adapt the school year to the seasonal needs of labor in certain agricultural areas.71

Postcolonial Africa and Child Labor Using the same boundaries drawn by their colonizers, most African countries became independent nation-states by the early 1960s. Initially, the postcolonial period was filled with great optimism for prosperity, equal opportunity, and economic development. Instead of independence and increasing incomes, a period of underdevelopment took hold. In many ways, the legacy of colonialism shackled these newly independent countries with systemic problems. Use of the colonial boundaries that grouped different and sometimes antagonistic ethnic groups under the same flag and with unequal power and opportunity created the fodder for civil war and political instability. Notable civil wars broke out in Nigeria in the 1960s, Ethiopia in the 1970s, Sudan and Liberia in the 1980s, and Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s. Civil wars hurt children in many ways. They suffer psychosocial trauma when parents are killed. Children witness violence and suffer posttraumatic stress disorder. They also undergo forcible induction into armies as porters, cooks, prostitutes, and even soldiers. In nearly all of these cases, children become committed to these conflicts due to poverty and inequality, and not because of political ideology. From independence through the 1980s, national-level politicians and international agencies invested significant levels of borrowed development money in urban areas while at the same time neglecting the needs of rural

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37

areas. By the 1980s, African governments had a serious debt problem and began defaulting on international loan repayments. By 1986, Africa’s collective foreign debt was larger than the total income or economic output of the continent. 72 The World Bank and international lending institutions responded by imposing structural adjustment programs that forced governments to curtail spending on social services—such as food, health and public services, and education—in order to redirect money for debt repayment. 73 The effect on children has been obvious, as they have received even less of a short budgetary stick in terms of education and healthcare. These effects have been more acute in rural areas, which received very little of the initial investment. The major event reshaping childhood and expectations for children’s labor during the postcolonial era has been urbanization. Urban bias set the tone for the rapid urbanization of sub-Saharan Africa. Even though politicians and international donors neglected the needs of rural areas from the 1960s through the 1980s, rural populations were still subject to the repayment of loans and the costs of development. The inequality brought about by this rural-urban divide frames the conceptualization of childhood and what is expected of children in the postcolonial context. This rural-urban divide also patterns the development of partnership marriages alongside the traditional lineage-based marriages. A study of a small Tanzanian community that underwent a shift from subsistence agriculture with hoe cultivation to wage labor, describes this process and shows how two African family types emerged.74 Partnership and lineage-based families also pattern two distinct parental perspectives on what childhood should be and how children should spend their time. Partnership families tend to view their children as a means of enjoyment and pleasure, even in polygynous families, whereas lineage-based families tend to see their children as being necessary for labor needs in the immediate term, and as investments and old-age insurance for the future. Lineage-based families, especially prominent in rural areas, determine inheritance rights through a bloodline for land. Elders provide land to a young man and assist him financially and in the decision of taking a wife. Data from Tanzania indicate that among the men in partnership marriages, all had been rural-urban migrants at one point in their lives, compared with less than one-third of men in traditional lineage-based families. Partnership families tend to be more couple-centered, with marriages being the result of substantial and even free choice of spouse. Partnership families have fewer children and are more likely to be involved in the cash economy than lineage-based families.75 The rural-urban divide therefore further corresponds with the gap between subsistence agriculture and the postcolonial cash economy. This is not a firm divide, as some families straddle both economies in trying to

38

Child Labor

provide for their members. Some have failed to achieve success in the postcolonial cash economy and have recoiled into a subsistence form of production. Some have never been a part of the cash economy and have chosen to stay on the land. Still others have been pushed off the land in regions of rapid population growth and forced to take work for low wages in the cash economy because they do not have the skills to compete successfully. Rural families continue to treat work as education, mainly because there is an absence of alternatives. Not every village has a primary school. Most do not have a secondary school. For example, it is common for Bobo children in rural Mali to walk a few miles each day to the nearest primary school. Even when a child qualifies for secondary school, most parents are not able to pay the school fees and room and board in a town where a secondary school may be found. In villages, the training provided by parents through the socialization of their children in farm work is considered by local standards to be adequate preparation for adult work in the village. Recruiting and keeping schoolteachers in rural areas is difficult. The educated, generally raised in urban areas, are not enthusiastic about the possibility of living in a village without electricity, running water, or urban forms of entertainment. Many rural children migrate to urban areas without their parents, either under fostering by a relative or sometimes alone. These migrant children often perform domestic, market, and apprenticeship work. Their childhood remains similar to their rural past in that their labor is the training or education that will prepare them for the future. Most children who migrate for work to urban areas remain tied to their rural families through remittances, visits, and the exchange of labor and goods. Children should be viewed as a steady stream migrating to urban areas in search of income-generating opportunities and educational opportunities made available through work.76 Because of urbanization, more and more children live independently of their households and extended families in urban areas of Africa, and must fend for themselves.77 Postcolonial Africa has seen increased poverty and a marked disparity between rural and urban areas. Children’s opportunities are limited in terms of what their households can afford to secure for them, which in turn shapes their childhood. Families strategically place their children sometimes in school, more often in work in urban areas, and in some rare cases even relinquish or sell their children to strangers in hopes of creating opportunities.78 Rural parents are hard-pressed to provide real opportunities for their children. Often, the short-term survival needs of many families are at odds with the long-term well-being and development of children. This competitive environment, marked by constrained opportunity, frames the postcolonial concept of childhood in Africa. Parents may want their children to attend school, as documented in a study from Cameroon, but these

The Cultural and Historical Context

39

children are also needed to care for their younger siblings.79 New ideas about what is good for the socialization and development of children collide with the daily work that must be done in order to sustain the family unit. These inequalities in opportunity, which become mainly delineated by rural or urban background, divide childhood and future opportunities in the postcolonial period.

Culture, Childhood, and Child Labor in Sub-Saharan Africa Defining childhood in the African context allows us to understand contemporary child labor, because elements of prior eras still shape what it means to be a child in Africa today. In each of these eras, there was “acceptable” training, which generally meant labor, for children. In African societies, craftsmen’s children become craftsmen and peasants’ children become subsistence farmers. Societies heavily influenced by Islam encourage child labor in cases where it can be functional for the religion. Child labor emerges as a response to female seclusion dictated by Islam’s institution of purdah on the one hand, and on the other hand as a coping mechanism for poor rural parents hoping to secure educational and religious opportunities for their children engaged in talibe begging for a marabout. A legacy of invisible child labor in commercial agriculture and mining emerges from the colonial Christian era. Commercial farms in South Africa and Zimbabwe are excellent examples where children’s labor went uncounted or was assumed to be that of the household head, and the doublespeak of providing education for African children was part of a larger package of exploiting children’s labor and that of their families. Another colonial legacy is the idea that children can be separated from their parents for use as workers and for training.80 The postcolonial era has seen even more separation of children from their parents, but it should be framed by the ruralurban opportunity divide for children—of divergent educational, training, and work opportunities. Even today, certain types of child labor are still considered to be acceptable training. An overarching cultural model that considers the triple heritage of African, Islamic, and colonial Christian inputs explains the roots of certain forms of child labor but has limitations. The triple heritage explains some of the causes of child labor and the various forms it can take; however, these cultural factors are limited in explaining all of child labor, especially those forms that have emerged since independence. Increasingly, child labor is a function of poverty and inequality. Since the 1960s, children’s labor has taken the form of poor children’s labor. Most African children work due to economic necessity and as part of

40

Child Labor

a household strategy. Additionally, children’s labor has been patterned by the rural-urban divide, which translates again into the form of poor children’s labor. If inequality can be addressed, especially as it can be viewed in terms of rural-urban disparities of investment, opportunity, education, and social services, then perhaps we can develop policies that will shrink the work of children and change the different conceptions of childhood based on social class and rural-urban background.

Notes 1. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Whittington), “Sub-Saharan Africa”; quotation by Alice Ouedrago, an ILO officer, when asked why Africa has the worst statistics for child labor. 2. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. 3. See de Mause, The History of Childhood; Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London; and Pollock, Forgotten Children. 4. See Balagoplan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”; James and Prout, Abandoned Children; Nieuwenhuys, “Global Childhood and the Politics of Contempt”; and Panter-Brick and Smith, Abandoned Children. 5. Ennew, The Sexual Exploitation of Children, p. 21. 6. Last, “Putting Children First.” 7. See James and Prout, Abandoned Children; Nieuwenhuys, “Global Childhood and the Politics of Contempt”; and Panter-Brick and Smith, Abandoned Children. 8. See Balagoplan, “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods”; Grier, “Invisible Hands”; Grier, “Earn as You Learn”; Hansen, “Labor Migration and Urban Child Labor”; Reynolds, Children at the Crossroads; and van Onselen, Chibaro. 9. Whiting and Whiting, Children in Six Cultures. 10. Fortes, “Social and Psychological Aspects.” 11. Davidson, The African Past; Malinowski, The Foundations of Faith and Morals. 12. Fortes, “Social and Psychological Aspects.” 13. Ibid., p. 20. 14. Ibid. 15. Oppong, Growing Up in Dagbon, p. 51. 16. Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline, p. 37. 17. Katz, “Children and the Environment.” 18. Sharp, “The Work Ideology”; Levine, “‘Picannin’ Wages.” 19. Morice, “Underpaid Child Labour.” 20. Reynolds, Dance Civet Cat. 21. Bass, “Beyond Homework.” 22. Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work.” 23. Porter, “The Agency of Children.” 24. Hollos, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood.” 25. Callaway and Creevey, The Heritage of Islam. 26. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 27. Meillassoux, “Troubled Youth.” 28. Meillassoux, “Looking Ahead,” p. 316.

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29. Davidson, The African Past. 30. Ibid.; Snow, The Star Raft. 31. Davidson, The African Past. 32. Ibid. 33. Hunt, “Children’s Rights in West Africa.” 34. Mbaye and Fall, “The Disintegrating Social Fabric.” 35. Republic of Senegal, Code du travail; Republic of Senegal, Situation économique. 36. Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal. 37. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 38. Mbaye and Fall, “The Disintegrating Social Fabric.” 39. Hunt, “Children’s Rights in West Africa,” p. 47. 40. Ibid. 41. The Tidiane brotherhood is the largest brotherhood in Senegal, accounting for just over 50 percent of the total Muslim population. The percentage breakdown of the Senegalese Muslim population by brotherhood is as follows: Tidiane 50.1 percent, Mouride 31.8 percent, Qadiri 12.3 percent, Layenne 1.0 percent, other 5.1 percent. Adapted from Bass, Working for Peanuts, p. 146. 42. The Independent, “Street Children.” 43. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Street Children in the Gambia. 44. Ibid. 45. Schildkrout, “Women’s Work and Children’s Work.” 46. Callaway, Muslim Hausa Women; Schildkrout, “Age and Gender”; Schildkrout, “Dependence and Autonomy.” 47. Schildkrout, “Age and Gender,” p. 119. 48. Ibid., p. 133. 49. Ibid. 50. Boyden, “Childhood and the Policy-Makers.” 51. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa; Ascherson, The King Incorporated. 52. Suret-Canale, “The Social and Historical Significance,” p. 17. 53. Bass, Working for Peanuts, p. 21. 54. Goldsmith, The Trap, p. 57. 55. U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers, tab. 2.1. 56. World Bank, African Development Indicators 1996, fig. 7-2, p. 210. 57. McMichael, Development and Social Change. 58. Bujra, “A Third World in the Making,” pp. 146–147. 59. Grier provides historical criticism of the colonial “earn and learn” schools, while Bourdillon comments on these schools in the 1990s. Grier, “Invisible Hands”; Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 60. Levine, “‘Picannin’ Wages”; Grier, “Invisible Hands.” 61. Ibid. 62. Levine, “‘Picannin’ Wages.” 63. Van Onselen, Chibaro. 64. Shell, Children of Bondage. 65. Grier, “Invisible Hands.” 66. Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 67. Grier, “Invisible Hands.” 68. Hansen, “Labor Migration.” 69. McMichael, Development and Social Change, p. 17.

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70. Grier, “Invisible Hands.” 71. Ibid. 72. Bradshaw and Wallace, Global Inequalities. 73. Buchmann, “The Debt Crisis.” 74. Hollos, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood”; Hollos and Larson, “From Lineage to Conjugality.” 75. Hollos, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood.” 76. Documented by Bass, Working for Peanuts; and Sharp, “The Work Ideology”; May, “Handshops and Hope”; and Levine, “‘Picannin’ Wages.” 77. For examples, see Bass, Working for Peanuts; May, “Handshops and Hope”; and Sharp, “The Work Ideology.” 78. Bass, “Child Labor and Household Strategies.” 79. Nsamenang, “Early Childhood Care.” 80. Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

3 The Political Economy of Children’s Work

The colonists designed the scenario for disaster and the Africans seem to be trying their best to fulfill it.1 The tragedy of Africa is that it has grown progressively less developed since independence.2 In African families . . . there is a feeling that the policies dictated by international institutions have not so much trickled down as fallen on their heads. Something that looks good as a national policy can be devastating for a village.3 Sub-Saharan Africa is battered by structural constraints, including poverty, debt, corruption, war, ethnic conflict, disease, international competition, and ineffective legislation. This chapter analyzes the economic and political factors that provide the backdrop for child labor in sub-Saharan Africa as they relate to diminished educational opportunities and expanding work responsibilities for children.

Poverty Poverty is a major factor that explains child labor, and African countries rank consistently among the poorest in the world. The five poorest— Ethiopia, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Malawi, and Niger—are found in subSaharan Africa and have annual per capita incomes (measured in gross national product [GNP] per capita) of U.S.$100, U.S.$120, U.S.$160, U.S.$180, and U.S.$190 respectively.4 When considering regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africa ranks at the bottom in national income per capita (shown in Table 1.2). Indeed, the bleakest picture worldwide for child labor

43

44

Child Labor

rests in Africa, the region with the highest proportion of working children. Although the incidence of child labor in absolute numbers is still quite high in Southeast Asia, the proportion of children who work has been declining in Asia in recent years alongside rising per capita incomes, the spread of basic education, and a reduction in family size.5 Recent research using data from forty-seven countries around the world examined the percentage of child workers and structural variables such as income per capita.6 This research found that lower rates of child labor are evident in countries with higher levels of income and lower levels of agricultural production as a percentage of national income. This research did not specify which countries were included in the analysis, but the relationships established are worth examining in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. Data are available for use in considering whether these relationships hold in the African context. Table 3.1 shows the estimated proportion of children ten to fourteen years old in the labor force for thirty-seven subSaharan African countries in 1980 and 1999 (data not available for the Central African Republic), and other selected characteristics.7 The data indicate that while higher rates of child labor are found in sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions of the world, these rates have declined in every country listed in the table between 1980 and 1999. Burkina Faso experienced the most precipitous drop in child labor, 26 percent. Other countries that have substantially reduced the proportion of children who work, by 10 percent or more, include Namibia, Senegal, Gabon, Malawi, Botswana, Cameroon, and Gambia. Table 3.1 indicates that a negative relationship exists between labor force participation rates of children and real income per capita (gross domestic product [GDP] adjusted for purchasing power parity across nations). Figure 3.1 provides a visual representation of the relationship, with each point on the scatterplot representing one of thirty-seven countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Child labor force participation rates are shown among ten- to fourteen-year-olds along the y-axis and real income per capita along the x-axis. In general, as real per capita income increases, child labor decreases. Those with the highest incomes, namely South Africa, Botswana, Gabon, and Namibia, have child labor rates of less than 20 percent. The regression line associated with the data points representing subSaharan African countries shows that lower income translates into higher rates of child labor. Additionally, the agricultural sector can be viewed as fueling child labor in sub-Saharan Africa. Lower incomes are prevalent in rural areas, and most of these children are found working in agricultural activities.8 Table 3.1 also includes the percentage of income derived from agriculture and the proportion of the population living in rural areas as possible corre-

NA 61 50 71 48 49 43 45 44 46 42 43 43 44 40 39 41 45 33 43 33 37 30

Percentage of Children Working, 1980 NA 52 49 45 44 44 41 40 39 39 37 37 37 34 34 33 32 32 29 28 28 28 27

Percentage of Children Working, 1999 1,700 850 720 1,000 1,000 1,100 900 1,500 710 600 1,000 850 710 1,100 800 1,000 1,300 900 600 1,600 1,000 880 1,030

Real GDPa per Capita, 2000 290 240 120 1,410 190 320 250 360 200 100 210 160 1,260 330 250 220 490 180 755 500 330 530 380

GNPb per Capita, 2000 55 47 52 31 41 44 46 23 17 6 36 62 45 31 30 33 24 38 58 18 40 20 38

Percentage of GDP in Agriculture, 2000

Children Ten to Fourteen Years Old in Labor Force and Other Characteristics by Country

Central African Republic (CAR) Mali Burundi Burkina Faso Niger Uganda Rwanda Kenya Eritrea Ethiopia Chad Guinea-Bissau Tanzania Gambia Madagascar Mozambique Guinea Malawi Congo, Democratic Republic (DRC) Senegal Sudan Zimbabwe Benin

Table 3.1

151 223 176 210 252 162 203 118 105 180 189 214 152 110 149 203 167 227 161 124 109 118 145

Under-Five Mortality per 1,000 Live Births, 2000

continues

59 71 91 82 80 86 94 68 82 83 77 77 68 68 73 61 68 76 70 53 65 65 58

Percentage Rural, 1999

continued

36 30 27 29 34 30 28 28 34 19 26 29 19 16 1

Percentage of Children Working, 1980 27 26 26 24 23 22 21 19 18 16 15 15 14 12 0

Percentage of Children Working, 1999 1,500 1,000 1,100 950 1,700 2,000 2,400 1,600 4,300 2,500 6,600 6,300 510 1,900 8,500

Real GDPa per Capita, 2000 310 270 550 260 600 390 550 670 1,890 330 3,240 3,300 130 400 3,170

GNPb per Capita, 2000 41 7 10 39 44 25 18 26 13 25 4 8 43 36 4

Percentage of GDP in Agriculture, 2000 143 208 144 151 154 142 141 180 108 187 95 133 283 109 76

Under-Five Mortality per 1,000 Live Births, 2000 67 66 38 57 52 44 73 54 70 60 50 20 64 NA 50

Percentage Rural, 1999

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 74–76. Notes: a. GDP refers to gross domestic product (or income) in U.S. dollars, adjusted to reflect purchasing power parity (ppp) across countries and calculated using the World Bank Atlas method. b. GNP refers to gross national product (or income) in U.S. dollars, adjusted to reflect purchasing power parity (ppp) across countries and calculated using the World Bank Atlas method. NA = Not available.

Togo Angola Congo, Republic (Brazzaville) Nigeria Cameroon Mauritania Lesotho Côte d’Ivoire Namibia Zambia Botswana Gabon Sierra Leone Ghana South Africa

Table 3.1

The Political Economy of Children’s Work Figure 3.1

47

Children in Labor Force by Income in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 74–76. Notes: y = –13.09Ln(x) + 124. R2 = 0.589.

lates of the incidence of child labor. Figures 3.2 and 3.3 provide visual representations of these relationships for thirty-seven sub-Saharan African countries for which data are available. Figure 3.2 presents a scatterplot and regression line to demonstrate that there is a positive relationship between the proportion of children working and the proportion of the total population residing in rural areas. As the percentage of the rural population increases, so does the rate of child labor. Most of these working children are found in subsistence agriculture. A similar finding is evident when examining the relationship between the percentage of children working and the percentage of GDP derived from agricultural production. Figure 3.3 shows that children are more likely to work when a higher percentage of their GDP is derived from agricultural production. The relationships shown in Figures 3.2 and 3.3 provide additional support for the poverty, inequality, and rural-urban divide conclusions reached in Chapter 2. Structural factors shape the context of child labor in sub-Saharan Africa. Even though culture shapes specific forms of child labor, the overall child labor issue revolves around poverty and the rural-urban divide. Even though “child labor” does not have a negative meaning in most African languages, and can be beneficial to education and training, this cultural propensity is overridden by the structural component of income, which is mainly patterned by rural-urban background. Those countries with higher incomes on average and more urbanized populations and economies have lower child labor force participation rates, notwithstanding traditional cultural values.

48 Figure 3.2

Child Labor Children in Labor Force by Rural Population in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 74–76. Notes: Selected countries for which data are available include: South Africa, Ghana, Botswana, Gabon, Zambia, Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Lesotho, Mauritania, Cameroon, Nigeria, Angola, Republic of Congo, Benin, Togo, Senegal, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Gambia, Chad, Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Burundi, and Mali. y = 0.53x – 5.87. R2 = 0.481.

The few studies that have examined children’s well-being in developing countries point to relatively low incomes or poverty as preceding low levels of child well-being.9 Poverty generally leads to other negative consequences, such as rapid population growth, poor health and nutrition, inadequate education, and poverty, that coalesce, in turn, to shape children’s life opportunities. For example, in Kenya, a country battered by poverty, unstable political and social institutions, and serious health problems like the AIDS epidemic, children are vulnerable to a lack of educational opportunities at a minimum and disease and death in the worst cases. The data in Table 3.1 show that Kenya in 1999 had a relatively high rate of labor force participation by children, 40 percent, relatively low per capita income, U.S.$1,500, a large rural population, 68 percent, and 118 children per 1,000 dying before the age of five years. Research on children’s quality of life in Kenya found that they are sicker today than ever before, and that there is tremendous growth in homelessness and the number of “street children.”10 Most street children work in order to survive, and many are the product of families who have dissolved due to the weight of poverty and disease.

The Political Economy of Children’s Work Figure 3.3

49

Children in Labor Force by GDP from Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2001

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 74–76. Notes: Selected countries for which data are available include: South Africa, Ghana, Botswana, Gabon, Zambia, Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Lesotho, Mauritania, Cameroon, Nigeria, Angola, Republic of Congo, Benin, Togo, Senegal, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Gambia, Chad, Madagascar, Guinea-Bissau, Tanzania, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Burundi, and Mali. y = 0.34x + 19.01. R2 = 0.213.

The under-five mortality rate is included for each country in Table 3.1 to show how a general measure of child well-being such as this varies with income and other human development indicators. If one glances through the list of countries with the highest rates of child labor, those with 40 percent or more of all children ten to fourteen years old working also have relatively high under-five mortality rates. There are exceptions, but generally the highest rates of under-five mortality are found among children who reside in countries with high child labor rates, low incomes, and economies mostly driven by the rural sector because the industrial sector has not developed. However, average income of individuals within a country fails to consider the distribution of income within a country, which also factors prominently in explaining child labor. Table 3.2 shows the distribution of income for selected countries with high child labor rates, mid-range child labor rates, and low child labor rates, and also includes a comparison category of countries outside Africa with negligible child labor rates. Typically, the

50 Table 3.2

Child Labor Child Labor Rates and Distribution of Income by Country, 2002 Distribution of Income Earners

African Countries That Exhibit High Child Labor Rates of 40% or More Mali Burkina Faso Niger Kenya African Countries That Exhibit MidRange Child Labor Rates of 20–39% Guinea Madagascar Mozambique Senegal African Countries That Exhibit Low Child Labor Rates of Less Than 20% Côte d’Ivoire Ghana South Africa Zambia Non-African Comparison Countries with Negligible Child Labor Rates Germany Japan Sweden United States

Lowest 10%

Highest 10%

1.8 2.2 0.8 1.8

40.4 39.5 35.4 34.9

2.6 2.2 2.5 2.6

32.0 37.3 31.7 33.5

3.1 2.4 1.1 1.1

28.8 29.5 45.9 41

3.3 4.8 3.7 1.8

23.7 21.7 20.1 30.5

Source: World Bank, World Development Report 2002 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2002), pp. 234–235. Note: Countries selected based on availability and validity of data.

child labor rate increases with greater income inequality, particularly when income is concentrated in the top 10 percent of the population. Those countries with the highest rates of child labor, 40 percent or more, show the greatest share of income earned by just 10 percent of the population. Compared with countries with high child labor rates, those countries that rank at the mid-range level of child labor force participation, between 20 and 39 percent, exhibit a smaller share of income concentrated in the top 10 percent of the population. Among those African countries that exhibit the lowest child labor rates, less than 20 percent, a more complex story emerges. In Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, income is the most evenly distributed, while South Africa and Zambia exhibit a high degree of income stratification toward the top 10 percent of the population. The four non-African countries with negligible child labor rates show income inequality rates at or below the lowest level found among the African countries. Overall, there appears to be a relationship between lower income and

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higher rates of child labor, and between greater inequality in income distribution and higher rates of child labor. It is most likely that income distribution is an intervening variable in explaining child labor rates, especially among countries where there are relatively lower incomes. The countries with the lowest levels of child labor tend also to have relatively higher levels of per capita income. Thus, at higher levels of income, perhaps there is less of a child labor problem, despite cases of inequality in the distribution of income in countries such as South Africa and Zambia, because there is more income available per capita. A more complete analysis with data points for all countries in sub-Saharan Africa is needed in order to fully explore this relationship. Using income and income inequality to explain child labor is a starting point, but other factors such as debt and structural adjustment policies, corruption, ethnic conflict and war, international competition, and legislation also affect child labor force participation rates. These other factors should be considered as latent variables, because it can be argued that they emanate from both poverty and income inequity.

Crushing Debt and Structural Adjustment Policies In many cases in sub-Saharan Africa, there is little hope that poverty may be reduced without writing off debt. By the late 1990s, Africa’s debt had become larger than the total economic output of the continent. As an answer to this, the Jubilee 2000 debt forgiveness social movement sought to encourage richer governments to forgive debt to developing countries. Whether Jubilee 2000 will succeed is yet to be seen. The most recent debt statistics, published in the 2002 edition of the World Bank’s World Development Report, define the African debt situation using statistics from 1999. It is unclear how much debt each African country has. Most African countries do not disclose the amount spent on interest payments, and some, such as Congo-Brazzaville, Madagascar, and Kenya, spend over 25 percent of their total government budget on interest payments to finance their debt obligations. In contrast, European countries spend just 11 percent of their total government budget on interest payments.11 For many African countries, it is as if they are in a car race yet have holes in their gas tanks, compared with richer countries around the world, because all economies are increasingly interconnected. By exporting hard currency that could be used for education or capital infrastructure, debt obligations continue to impede economic development in Africa. Most debt to African countries was created by loans made to undemocratic governments and leaders who simply deposited the money in Swiss

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bank accounts. One such case was that of President Félix HouphouëtBoigny of Côte d’Ivoire, who hid money overseas and purchased a luxury villa on the French Riviera. In 1983 he declared, “I do have assets abroad. But they are not assets belonging to Côte d’Ivoire. What sensible man does not keep his assets in Switzerland, the whole world’s bank? I would be crazy to sacrifice my children’s future in this crazy country without thinking of their future.” 12 In 1990, Africa Report estimated HouphouëtBoigny’s fortune to be at least U.S.$118 million. 13 When HouphouëtBoigny died, his riches transferred to his family members; the people of Côte d’Ivoire continue to pay the interest on his borrowed money. Additionally, some African countries accumulated debts during the Cold War, when loans were offered more to buy influence and allegiance, and secondarily to stimulate economic development and improve living conditions. For example, international agencies lent and the U.S. government donated money to Zaire’s leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, for over thirty years even though it was known that the money was being deposited in Swiss bank accounts and not going to the people and development of the country. The people of Zaire, now renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo, carry the burden of Mobutu’s debt. The international financial community has responded to the debt problem by pressuring indebted developing country governments to implement austerity policies, known as structural adjustment policies (SAPs), to make debt repayment possible. Foreign debt has taken on a new level of hardship for Africa’s poorest citizens since the initiation of SAPs. These structural adjustment policies have created general suffering in many poor countries, and particularly among children, by cutting government spending on food, healthcare, social services, and education in order to save money for debt repayment.14 One quantitative study that has assessed the impact of the global debt crisis on children found that externally imposed measures have directly or indirectly impeded child survival, childhood immunization, economic growth, prevalence of health attendants, and adequate nutrition.15 It is not just lack of economic growth but the level of debt and how it is addressed that have affected children’s well-being. The scenario unfolds, then, of a nation trying, perhaps futilely, to improve life chances in areas such as education and childhood immunizations, while also being forced to trim its budget in the areas of education and health services, respectively, in order to pay the debt of a former leader. In the late 1970s, many African governments were thought to be bloated, unresponsive, and inefficient. Thus SAPs included at their core the idea of shrinking the state as a means of targeting the seemingly bloated bureaucracies of developing countries. Zaire’s President Mobutu and Côte d’Ivoire’s President Houphouët-Boigny both led governments fitting this mold. For example, Houphouët-Boigny sought to develop his home village

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of Yamousoukro by moving the governmental capital there and building a replica of the Vatican’s St. Peter’s basilica on the outskirts of the town. The Pope successfully dissuaded local authorities not to mount a cross on the replica, which would have resulted in its being taller than the original, by agreeing to visit and bless the basilica. The structural adjustment solutions proposed by the World Bank were designed to tie the hands of leaders from lavish spending along these lines.16 The injustice done to children by debt and structural adjustment policies in sub-Saharan Africa is beginning to be voiced. The United Nations Children’s Fund asserts, “Hundreds of thousands of the developing world’s children have given their lives to pay their countries’ debts, and many millions more are still paying the interest with their malnourished bodies.”17 Concerned groups have asked that the human impact be considered along with these structural adjustment policies. International lenders like the World Bank are beginning to listen. A recent study by the Bank outlines policies that will spur development while protecting children and women.18 Another Bank paper considers the needs of children already engaged in full-time work.19 Still, there is much to be done in easing the burden on Africa’s children.

Corrupt Leaders Even though every loan has a lender, it is the borrower who is held accountable. Corrupt leaders and poor oversight among the educated elite have crippled the ability of African societies to get ahead economically. Across the board, the average African has a lower standard of living and is saddled with more debt today than at independence. Forty years later, children are born into societies strapped with debt and low incomes, and therefore toil away their childhoods in order to eke out a living for their families and pay the debts of the previous generation of elites. Most African heads of state have aggravated the poverty and debt situation through poor management and, in many cases, theft. A common phrase in western Africa, “eating the money,” adequately describes how funds have been diverted from legitimate infrastructure projects to private bank accounts, stymieing economic development. For example, for over twenty years, Kenya’s recent president, Daniel Arap Moi, ruled the country and in the process socked away tremendous wealth for his personal use.20 He has billions of dollars on deposit in foreign bank accounts and invested in Kenyan real estate. Another notable example is Liberia’s recent president, Charles Taylor, who earned more money from his private timber deals in 2001, over U.S.$40 million, than the total operating budget of the country. Leaders such as Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings of Ghana and Robert

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Mugabe of Zimbabwe have also enriched themselves while leading their countries’ governments.21 Such embezzlement stories often overshadow those of the small-time elite criminals in sub-Saharan Africa. A case from Côte d’Ivoire shows how elites have robbed their fellow citizens and increased children’s poverty. President Houphouët-Boigny’s corruption started with him and escalated with his elite collaborators, who stole from the treasury.22 The central bank estimated in 1990 that 130 billion CFA francs (U.S.$456 million) were “spirited out of the country illegally each year.”23 In this case, HouphouëtBoigny had lost considerable control of his government, and children’s lives were affected to the extent that public resources that could pay for upgrades in education or healthcare were diverted to high-ranking and well-connected individuals.24 In Sierra Leone, elite theft has directly impacted the educational opportunities available for children. Although schooling is required for all children through the primary level, most schools along with clinics and hospitals were destroyed during the civil war of the 1990s, and children’s families cannot afford to pay the required fees for education. Added to this, teachers often go unpaid by the state. In 1999, senior Ministry of Education officials were charged with embezzling roughly 1 billion leones (U.S.$500,000) slated to pay arrears in teachers’ salaries.25 Ironically, the children of these elites are not likely to suffer, for most attend private schools. The resulting condition is that many children receive little or no formal schooling in Sierra Leone today, a principal alternative to work. Some leaders fueled the debt situations of their countries by borrowing extensively in order to support their lavish lifestyles or to build symbols signifying the greatness of their regimes. It is not often lost on the population that a presidential motorcade of ten Mercedes-Benzes and fifty motorcycles seems excessive as it rolls by citizens who have no clean drinking water, access to electricity, education for their children, or even a pair of shoes. Helping to prop up these self-interested leaders are cadres of elites who have helped to call the shots since independence and who continue to choke the masses economically. Generally, there is a strong, central government that maintains order and basic services such as running water, electricity, and trash pickup for the small elite class, but that fails to provide basic services to the masses. Rather than pay teachers decent wages and build schools, the wealthy live in guarded compounds, evade taxes, and get rich from kickback schemes. Angola provides a useful example of the type of corruption that leaders have often encouraged and sometimes failed to limit in sub-Saharan African countries. Angola, blessed with large deposits of both diamonds and oil, has a defense ministry that purchased weapons systems from the U.S. government in 1999 as part of a monetary kickback

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scheme, which became known as Angola-gate, to benefit the defense minister and his cronies.26 Meanwhile, over 90 percent of the people in the capital city live without electricity and running water, and about 60 percent of Angola’s children die before reaching age five. Two neighboring countries, Botswana and Namibia, which have comparable natural resource wealth but more benevolent governance, exhibit higher incomes, better childhood health, and lower rates of child labor. Until 1990, most African heads of state had left office in one of two ways, either by death due to old age or by military coup.27 Just a handful of sub-Saharan African countries held regular multiparty elections in the early 1980s.28 Once in power, African leaders rarely lost elections. A notable example is Zambia under Kenneth Kaunda, who won elections using tactics such as ballot fixing, creative vote counting, postponing elections, outlawing opposition parties, arresting popular candidates, intimidating voters, and playing on ethnic tensions. Generally, it is a combination of these tactics that keeps leaders in power. Another example is that of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who has retained his position by inciting ethnic conflict, repression, jailing critics, and ballot fixing. Both Kuanda and Mugabe clung to power while continuously sucking the lifeblood from their economies.29 This began to change in the 1990s as democracy established a foothold in Africa. Several democratic leaders have taken the reins and hopefully will prove to be more accountable to their people. Africa’s citizens are increasingly willing to hold their leaders accountable by taking to the streets. In 2001, public demonstrations and outrage cowed President Chiluba of Zambia to step down according to term limits written into the constitution. Still other leaders have repressed democracy, as in the case of President Abdoulaye Diouf of Senegal, who only recently stepped down in a democratic election after nearly twenty years of rule. In the worst cases of power retention, some leaders have tortured and killed opponents in order to maintain their positions, notably Mobutu of Zaire, Idi Amin of Uganda, Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo, and Charles Taylor of Liberia.30 Clearly, there is an opportunity for African leaders to do right by their citizens. This “new guard” of democratic leaders in sub-Saharan Africa has already dismantled the Organization of African Unity, which was founded in 1963 but had little power, no real budget, and no common civic agenda. It has been replaced by the African Union, a group represented by fiftythree country presidents and prime ministers on the African continent. At its first meeting, the African Union proclaimed a new era of democracy, stability, and good governance. Members are required to commit to democratic principles and to respect human rights, and are held accountable by other member states. Given the history of Africa’s postcolonial governance,

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there is room for skepticism, but history tells us that representation by the people evolves gradually over time, and this may be a new beginning for good governance in Africa.31 Perhaps the people and the new democratic guard of leaders will prevail. This could provide the stability and the accountability for children in African societies to be educated, to be offered opportunities, and to prosper.

War and Ethnic Strife War and ethnic strife have further constrained children’s opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa. Much of this is a result of the boundaries left by the colonial governments. Part of this war and ethnic strife is due to selfish leaders anxious about retaining their positions or about enriching themselves. The boundaries imposed by the colonial regimes have little correspondence with African ethnic groups and languages. In most cases, ethnic group identification is a stronger influence than national consciousness. Although the boundaries are colonial, the dominant languages generally are not. The colonial language is typically the language of power and mostly spoken by elites. Most African countries have strong societies but weak states, meaning that the regulations, values, and social norms of society organize and govern society more than the state.32 African institutions like family and community, which often differ by ethnicity, greatly regulate everyday social relations and behavior. In a context of strong societies and weak states, other ethnic groups may resent the ethnic group that holds most of the power or controls most of the wealth. In countries such as Rwanda and Burundi, the roots of recent civil wars can be traced to the preference in opportunities accorded one ethnic group over another. Ethnic strife and wrangling over natural resources or wealth have been main ingredients in the recipe for the persistence of poverty, which in turn forces households to place their children in work roles rather than school. For example, the Wolof, Poular, Dioula, Mandinke, and Sereer peoples all reside within Senegal’s borders but speak different languages, have different cultures, and even practice varying religions. A separatist movement thrives in the relatively more affluent southern region, which mainly comprises the Dioula ethnic group. The Dioula, who are culturally different than other ethnic groups, reside on verdant land and play host to a vibrant beachfront tourist trade. The government is loath to lose this fertile and lucrative area, while the Dioula would like to determine their future and control their wealth. In Senegal, both the central government and the separatist region have used for military purposes resources that could have gone to such seeds of economic growth as education, roads, health clinics, or infrastructure.

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Ethnic tensions and power struggles over natural resources or wealth have led many sub-Saharan African countries into civil war, in which children suffer from the loss of production and some even become soldiers or workers to aid the war effort. Over 120,000 boys and girls in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be involved in armed conflicts, working as soldiers, porters, cooks, or sex slaves.33 Going back to the early 1990s, international observers have noted children’s involvement in conflicts in Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan. Children’s involvement in these conflicts has often blurred the lines between soldier and civilian, and between adult and child. Some children are forced to fight, such as the group of 200 students who were abducted by a rebel group from a boarding school in Burundi in December of 2001, even after a new coalition government incorporating Hutus and Tutsis came to power one month earlier.34 In an environment such as Liberia, some children have lost their family members and volunteer to fight in order to eat. There are few alternatives. Child soldiers are often drugged to steel them for battles and to commit atrocities. Drugs become a reward and then a habit for these child soldiers. The wealth and natural resources may differ—maybe diamonds, oil, bauxite, or gold—and the ethnicities may differ, but the result is the same again and again. Children play a constructive role in the outcome of the conflict, and yet also can be viewed as the ultimate casualities, as they lose parents, time in school, and opportunities for their futures.

The AIDS Pandemic In sub-Saharan Africa, over 7,000 people per day die due to AIDS. That is well over twice the number of people who died in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York in September 2001. Sadly, though, these deaths due to HIV/AIDS go mostly unnoticed by the Western world, aside from the occasional UN conference and its release of a report and press release. Worldwide, over 40 million people are infected with HIV. Another 20 million have died from it already. Of those deaths, over 70 percent have occurred in sub-Saharan African countries. Some countries, such as Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, have infection rates that are above 20 percent of the adult population and that continue to escalate. Of the estimated 5.6 million new infections recorded in 1999, 3.8 million (68 percent) were in sub-Saharan Africa.35 The worst-affected regions are in southern and eastern Africa, and the worst-affected age group is twenty- to forty-year-olds. HIV/AIDS affects people during the most productive years of their lives. South Africa has the

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Case in Point 3.1 Sudan Weak laws, civil unrest, and exploitation

In Sudan, the legal minimum age for work is sixteen, but the law is enforced only in the formal sector economy and only sporadically by the Ministry of Labor. Outside the capital, eleven- to twelve-year-old children work in a number of factories that produce edible oils. Severe poverty has produced widespread child labor in the informal, unregulated economy. Rural children assist their families with agricultural work from an early age, and there are few schools or alternatives. A 1999 constitution charged the state with protecting children from exploitation, but no real-world changes have resulted. While a law now prohibits forced and bonded labor by children, the government does not enforce this law and children continue to be taken as slaves. Slavery persists, mostly for children and women, and primarily in war areas. About 3,000 Ugandan children have been forced to become soldiers or sex slaves for a Ugandan rebel army that is supported by the Sudanese government. Some of these children, mostly girls, are sold or provided as gifts to arms dealers in Sudan. There are even slave markets that provide a venue for the buying and selling of children in Sudan.36

highest number of people infected with HIV in the world, and its rate of infection is over 10 percent. Life expectancy has been significantly decreased in several countries affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Since 1990, life expectancy in Botswana and Zambia has decreased an average of

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ten years. In Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Uganda, life expectancy has decreased an average of five years.37 HIV/AIDS can affect children in more than one way. They may grow up in a community that has been economically and psychologically devastated. Many adults in the prime caretaking and producing years of their lives are dying due to the virus. Children may become infected themselves. If so, they will suffer and then die prematurely because they cannot afford the antiretroviral medicines. Finally, children may be orphaned. Orphaned children face tremendous hardship, because they often must quit school, take on income-earning activities at an early age, and care for younger siblings. As such, orphans become a high-risk group for acquiring the virus, because they are poor and uneducated. These children are also likely to suffer stigma. Through the end of 1999 worldwide, it is estimated, 13.3 million HIVnegative children under age fifteen lost their mother or both parents to AIDS; 90 percent of these AIDS orphans are in Africa. 38 The United Nations Joint Program on HIV/AIDS recently estimated that AIDS will leave more than 20 million African children without one or both parents by 2010.39 According to United Nations estimates, about 900,000 Ethiopian children and about 700,000 Zambian children have been orphaned by AIDS.40 By 2005, the UN estimates, 25 percent of all children in Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, and Botswana will be orphaned by AIDS-related deaths.41 Stricken communities pursue a delicate balancing act to sustain households and the children and elderly who remain. AIDS has broken up the traditional family structure, and it is now common to see grandparents caring for children, countless children caring for children, and many orphans caring for orphans. A widow in Lusaka, Zambia, whose husband died from AIDS must sell vegetables at a local market in her effort to support her three children. A sixty-five-year-old woman now raises six of her nine grandchildren whose parents died from AIDS in a village in northern Malawi. An elderly man cares for his grandson, who was orphaned by AIDS, in a suburb of the eastern Zambia town of Chipata. Two girls, whose parents died of AIDS two years ago, live with their blind grandmother and assist in most of the household upkeep in the capital of Uganda. Two orphaned brothers, ages ten and twelve, care for themselves by doing their own laundry in a foster home in Lusaka, Zambia. Public services are scarce for AIDS orphans. In Nairobi, Kenya, AIDS orphans in one shantytown are lucky to receive one hot meal a day at the free shelter where they live. These are just a handful of the coping mechanisms used to deal with the AIDS crisis. 42 For children in eastern and southern Africa, the AIDS pandemic denies children the resources they need to access education, forcing them to choose work instead.

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International Competition and Free Trade Henry Clay noted in 1832, “Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition.” International competition and fair trade also frame the child labor debate in sub-Saharan Africa. First, one-third of children are engaged in the production process, and hence are likely to be affected by the global marketplace. Second, international trade affects the marketplace in which adults work to sustain households in developing nations, which in turn affects the opportunities and well-being of members of those households. Children stand to gain through the increased trade at higher prices of commodity goods such as cocoa, coffee, and tea, because child workers likely have helped produce these goods. In Kenya, children under age fifteen make up 25–30 percent of the total labor force in the production of commercial agricultural commodities such as tobacco, tea, and coffee.43 Likewise in neighboring Tanzania, where 37 percent of children work, 30 percent of those children live and work in the tobacco and tea commercial agricultural industries.44 Children have a history of working in commercial agriculture in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.45 Although the estimates vary widely, children from Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Mali work on cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire. Some of these children are victims of trafficking, who have probably been tricked or sold by their families into labor under brutal conditions. Cocoa from Côte d’Ivoire makes up 50 percent of all cocoa sold on the world market each year. Some argue that international trade raises incomes, promotes better governmental policies, and improves labor standards. The World Bank holds that competition in markets promotes equal opportunity, and can create demand for effective institutions and substitute for complicated governmental regulation. 46 Even relief and advocacy groups, like Oxfam International, now promote trade as a poverty-fighting strategy to complement aid and debt relief. Analyses by Oxfam indicate that sub-Saharan Africa’s share of world trade has fallen to 1.3 percent, a third of its level two decades ago, and that it could generate U.S.$70 billion by increasing its share of exported goods and services by one percentage point. Additionally, Oxfam found that “even modest increases in developing countries’ share of the world export market will massively outweigh any conceivable increase in aid.”47 International trade can bring economic benefits in general terms to households in developing nations, but this is only the case if developing countries can offer competitive goods and if the international market is free and fair. Indeed, if developing country markets can compete, international trade may prove a way for poor countries to develop their markets. Recent international investment in Ghana provides some pressure to increase local

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incomes, which improves the ability of households to sustain and provide opportunities for their children. For instance, a company based in Delaware has offices in Accra that digitize information for New York City environmental violation tickets.48 The Ghanaian typists earn 500,000 cedis a month (U.S.$70), which represents three times the local minimum wage and more than twice the average per capita income. The employees work in a clean environment, labor for eight-hour shifts, and take one thirty-minute and two ten-minute breaks per shift. The higher income paid by this international firm provides some pressure on the local market to raise wages, especially for data input positions. Compared with other African countries, Ghana is an attractive location to do business because the government is democratic, and society has enjoyed relative peace and stability for twenty years. The global free trade perspective is not viewed as the universal solution for alleviating Africa’s problems, especially among those from poorer countries. International trade can create pressure to bring about better work conditions for child laborers and for their parents. However, international trade regulations can be used as an excuse for richer countries to protect their markets. Many developing nations remain suspicious of international fair trade agreements, because they suspect that Western countries may try to find a pretext for closing off their import markets. More generally, the global marketplace intensifies the inequities that already exist, and the Ghanaian data input company is more the exception than the rule. Most sub-Saharan African countries produce agricultural goods. The international trade rules adopted within the World Trade Organization are generally made by the richer countries and followed by the poorer ones. Richer industrial countries, such as the United States, Japan, and those in Europe, have protected agriculture to the extent that the subsidies exceed the entire collective income of sub-Saharan Africa.49 In the summer of 2002, a multibillion-dollar farm bill was signed into law that offered additional subsidies to U.S. farmers and made it more difficult for African farmers to compete on world agricultural markets. How can subSaharan African countries compete when rich nations protect their farmers to this degree? The International Monetary Fund’s managing director, Horst Koehler, called these subsidies “unconscionable.”50 Additionally, economic development is further stifled in sub-Saharan African countries when richer nations impose tariffs on commodities and goods from poorer ones. Ghana’s finance minister recently pointed out that his country could sell cocoa beans duty free to Europe, but value-added products were less welcome.51 When Ghana sought to make its cocoa trade more profitable by making the beans into cocoa butter and chocolate, it learned that processed cocoa is subject to European tariffs. The world trading system, wherein raw cocoa is welcome but value-added cocoa is not,

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causes us to ask whether mercantilism is a thing of the past. In this case, it obviously is not. Western African trade activists contend that the U.S. government is hypocritical because it increases subsidies for U.S. farmers while also demanding through the International Monetary Fund that Ghana phase out subsidies for rice, a breadbasket product for this country. Ghana once had regions supported by rice production. In the central market in Accra today, vendors sell rice from the United States and Thailand, and fresh produce from all over their country. The local rice farmers cannot compete with the subsidized imports from the United States. The failure of Ghana’s ricegrowing regions to compete in the global marketplace has fueled ruralurban economic migration.52 Children are a part of this migration, whether accompanying their parents or being sent alone to work and establish a foothold in the urban setting. This example also provides support either for honest fair trade, especially among the richer countries that can afford to subsidize farmers, or for protecting a breadbasket industry such as rice production until it can remain competitive internationally.

Ineffective Legislation Unfortunately, legislation geared at eliminating child labor is like offering a starving child a slice of imaginary cake. International laws are not enforceable, so that even though a country may become a signatory to a UN convention that protects children from work, these laws become little more than window dressing for debt-ridden countries eager to please Western donors. Most sub-Saharan African countries have laws that limit children’s participation in work by establishing suitable conditions and a minimum working age. Additionally, most countries have ratified one or more of the International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Finally, children are protected through international human rights law and broad social condemnation of slavery and human trafficking. Nevertheless, child labor persists in African countries, especially in rural areas, and child slavery and human trafficking persist in Africa’s poorest countries. Table 3.3 shows the major ILO conventions that establish child labor legislation and their ratification or denouncement by sub-Saharan African country. Many international labor standards become law through UN conventions, wherein a country first becomes a signatory, agreeing in principle to the conditions, and then ratifies the convention through its own internal legislation. A country may denounce or ratify a convention in its national legislature. Some countries denounce earlier agreements when ratifying a

Denounced Denounced

Ratified

Ratified

Denounced Ratified

Denounced Denounced Ratified

Denounced

Denounced

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Denounced

Ratified

Denounced

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Denounced

Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

continues

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Convention 5: Convention 59: Convention 182: Minimum Age Minimum Age Convention 123: Convention 138: Elimination of for Industrial- Convention 29: for Industrial- Convention 105: Minimum Minimum the Worst Sector Abolition of Sector Abolition of Age for Age for Forms of Employment, Forced Labor, Employment, Forced Labor, Underground Employment, Child Labor, 1919 1930 1937 1957 Work, 1965 1973 1999

International Law: Conventions on Child Labor

Angola Benin Botswana Burkina Faso Burundi Cameroon Central African Republic (CAR) Chad Congo, Democratic Republic (DRC) Congo, Republic (Brazzaville) Côte d’Ivoire Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Ethiopia Gabon Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Kenya Lesotho

Table 3.3

continued

Ratified Denounced Denounced Ratified Denounced

Denounced Ratified

Denounced

Denounced Denounced

Denounced

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Denounced

Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified

Ratified Ratified Ratified Ratified

Convention 5: Convention 59: Convention 182: Minimum Age Minimum Age Convention 123: Convention 138: Elimination of for Industrial- Convention 29: for Industrial- Convention 105: Minimum Minimum the Worst Sector Abolition of Sector Abolition of Age for Age for Forms of Employment, Forced Labor, Employment, Forced Labor, Underground Employment, Child Labor, 1919 1930 1937 1957 Work, 1965 1973 1999

Source: International Labour Organization, “About Child Labor,” available at www.ilo.org.

Liberia Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritania Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda Senegal Sierra Leone South Africa Sudan Swaziland Tanzania Togo Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

Table 3.3

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65

more recent one.53 Most protections that have been signed into law nationally involve children in industrial employment and the more troublesome forms of work such as forced labor. As early as 1919, the international community agreed upon a reasonable working age in Convention 5: Minimum Age for Industrial Sector Employment. Convention 5 was revised by Convention 59 in 1937, and then later by Convention 138 in 1973. According to Convention 5, children under fourteen years old should not work, regardless of payment, in any public or private industrial activity. Work activities with members of the same family are exempt from this requirement. This is unfortunate, because it allows some employers to mask children’s work through undocumented family or kinship claims. As Table 3.3 indicates, Convention 5 is currently national law in a handful of countries, including Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, and Uganda, but many countries have denounced it in favor of the more recent conventions. Convention 59 is still used as the guiding principle for national laws on the minimum age for child labor in industry in Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Swaziland. Table 3.3 shows that Convention 138 has been ratified by twenty-eight of forty-one sub-Saharan African countries. It serves as the standard on child labor, defining it as any economic activity performed by a person under age fifteen. Countries where economic and educational facilities are insufficiently developed may initially specify a minimum age of fourteen years. Convention 138 allows children to engage in “light work” when they are thirteen years old, or age twelve in developing countries. Light work is defined as economic activities that are not likely to harm a child’s health or development, or to prevent a child from attending school. Finally, Convention 138 prohibits a child under age eighteen from engaging in “hazardous” work, defined as labor that may hurt a child’s health or safety or morals. Conventions 5, 59, and 138 provide an international standard for what is suitable for children’s work activities in the industrial sector. An overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African countries have adopted one of the three conventions. Just a handful of countries, namely Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Sudan, have not ratified an international convention setting a minimum age for work in the industrial sector. These conventions provide lower standards for an acceptable minimum working age in developing compared with other countries. These varying standards reflect how childhood is negotiable and constructed differently by society. Poorer societies provide children a shorter time period of protection from labor compared with richer societies. In addition to industrial sector standards, other conventions have developed standards for sectors such as agriculture and domestic work, and for varying levels of hazardous work such as forced labor, sex work, and

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underground work. Two conventions have sought to eliminate forced labor, Convention 29 of 1930 and Convention 105 of 1957. Considering both conventions, every sub-Saharan African country listed in Table 3.3 has signed and ratified an agreement that seeks to limit or eliminate forced labor.54 However, forced labor still exists in several countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Mauritania, Uganda, and Sudan. In 1999 the International Labor Organization adopted Convention 182: Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor. Table 3.3 shows that this convention has been ratified by twenty-eight of forty-one sub-Saharan African countries. This convention commits ratifying nations to take immediate action to prohibit and eliminate the worst forms of labor involving children under age eighteen, including (1) all forms of slavery, such as the sale or trafficking of children, debt bondage and forced labor, and forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict; (2) the use, procurement, or solicitation of a child for prostitution or pornography; (3) the use, procurement, or solicitation of a child for illicit activities like the production and trafficking of drugs; and (4) work that is harmful to the health, safety, or morals of children. Convention 182 also requires ratifying nations to remove children from abusive child labor and provide them with rehabilitation, social reintegration, free basic education, and vocational training. Finally, this convention requires nations to take into account the vulnerability of girls. Unfortunately, again, these requirements ring soundly in theory and hollow in practice. Convention 123: Minimum Age for Underground Work, adopted in 1965 by the ILO, sets a minimum age of sixteen for work in mines, but it has only been ratified by a few sub-Saharan African countries. Countries with substantial underground mining incomes, such as South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Kenya, and Sierra Leone, have not yet ratified this convention into national law. Therefore, if a country has few or no underground mines, ratification of this convention can be viewed as an easy bonus in the gamble for international aid. A more general agreement, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, states in Article 32, “State parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.” This convention recognizes the human rights of children, defined as individuals under eighteen years old. It defines human rights for children everywhere, without discrimination, including the rights to survival, the development to their fullest, protection from harmful influences, abuse, and exploitation, and full participation in family, cultural, and social life. An optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,

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67

on the involvement of children in armed conflict, became binding on February 12, 2002, for the states that ratified it. To date, twenty subSaharan African countries have signed and just four of these countries have ratified the optional protocol protecting children from armed conflict. Ratifying countries include Namibia, Kenya, and, ironically, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children are still being recruited into armed rebel movements. Another optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the sale of children, child prostitution, and child pornography, became binding January 18, 2002. Ratifying states are required to protect children from being sold, prostituted, or used in pornography. To date, nineteen sub-Saharan African countries have signed this agreement. Some ratifying countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, rank among the worst in the world in terms of their human rights records. Overall, the Convention on the Rights of the Child presents a vision of children who are neither the property of their parents nor helpless objects of charity. They are active rather than passive participants in society. They are human beings subject to their own rights. The guarantees granted to children in this agreement are laudable. Whether this document translates into practice in many ratifying countries is again questionable. Although nearly all sub-Saharan African countries have national legislation requiring a minimum working age and regulating the working conditions of children, child labor persists. The exemptions of agriculture and household employment from child labor legislation help explain why most child labor persists despite inspiring international legal agreements. Additionally, children’s work in the unregulated informal sector economy helps explain the persistence of child labor in such jobs as market vending, craftwork, construction, sex work, and begging. Better legislation and adequate enforcement of child labor laws could play a role in decreasing the rate of child labor in sub-Saharan African countries, but this enforcement is difficult and expensive beyond the formal sector economy. Many children in urban areas work in clandestine positions. The domestic child laborer who is passed off as a distant relative is an abundant example of this. Many of these international conventions seem to make more difference in the hearts of well-meaning international aid experts than in the lives of these children. On paper anyway, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child even looks effective in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to its new draft constitution (which has not been ratified), children are granted free education and protected from conscription into the army before age eighteen. In reality, roughly 30 percent of all ten- to fourteen-year-old children in this country work full-time, and armed rebel movements prey on young people to increase their forces. Clearly, there is a

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gap between the law and practice, and children pay the price of this discrepancy. While it may seem harmful for a government to turn a blind eye to the reality of extensive, full-time child labor despite laws prohibiting it, this is open to debate.55 Laws making child labor illegal may criminalize the child laborers rather than protecting them, therefore pushing children deeper into clandestine work situations and lowering their standard of living. In many ways, criminalizing child labor also criminalizes being poor, a condition over which many have little or no control. Also, guidelines defining legal and illegal work by age do not seem too practical in countries where a comprehensive birth registration system does not exist. Alas, legislation can play a role, but its relevancy is limited in a context where there are few viable alternatives. Schooling that provides job training thought to be useful by parents can be a competitive advantage, but this is not the situation in most countries where underfunded public schools employ teachers who get paid and hold course lessons irregularly. For many of these working children, some types of work can positively impact their livelihood.

Conclusion: Structural Constraints and Child Labor The weak-state concept holds that states are less powerful than family and community in regulating individuals’ lives. As a complement to this, the theory of the fragile state, which has been used to explain the failure of universal public education in Africa, adds to our understanding of child labor. According to the fragile-state concept, “Third World adaptions of the Western state are plopped down within quite un-Western pre-modern societies.”56 Western institutions such as mass schooling and ideas about childhood are often discordant with sub-Saharan African social norms and authority structures. With the fragile state, regardless of how watered down the modern goods are, the main objective is to appear modern. Schools open in rural villages and urban shantytowns, but they are often of dubious quality. Urban elites appear to be making progress, but literacy, primary school attendance, and test scores have stagnated. Similarly, postcolonial African countries crippled by poverty continue to aspire to modernity, but many times only by appearances. The fragile state buckles with poverty and does not have the political will among elites to expand public education and equal opportunity or to create relevant child labor legislation that makes sense to enforce. Poverty is like a torrential downpour for a child living in sub-Saharan Africa, and these political and economic structural factors sort out whether that child will find safe and dry shelter, or can pull him- or herself up by a branch. Too often, children are simply swept away by the economic needs

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69

Case in Point 3.2 Sierra Leone Ineffective legislation coupled with corruption

In Sierra Leone, the minimum age for employment is officially eighteen, although children age twelve and older may be employed in certain nonhazardous jobs if they have their parents’ consent. In practice, minimum-age child labor law is not enforced because there is no government entity charged with the task. Children routinely assist family businesses and work in small-scale vending. In rural areas, children work seasonally on family subsistence farms, again within the limits of this law. Other legislation requires school attendance through primary school, but there is a shortage of schools and teachers due to inadequate government funding of public education and the widespread destruction of educational facilities by rebel forces during the civil war of the 1990s. Families cannot afford to pay even minimal school fees, and corruption by top governmental officials robs the educational budget. In 1999, senior officials of the Ministry of Education were charged with embezzling roughly U.S.$500,000 slated to pay arrears in teachers’ salaries.57 Regardless of whether these charges will translate into convictions or reform, it is the children of Sierra Leone who suffer.

of their households. The rain keeps coming down on African families, and children react differently based on the larger political and economic situation. Income inequality, corrupt governments, war and ethnic conflict, international trade and competition, and disease define different outcomes

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for children. A social safety net or protective laws exist in name only. In lieu of a state presence, household-level social resources shield children from poverty and these other structural factors.

Notes 1. Davidson, The African Past, p. xv. 2. Bradshaw and Wallace, Global Inequalities, p. 63 (emphasis in original). 3. New York Times (Crossette), “The Second Sex in the Third World,” p. 1, quoting Gertrude Mongella. 4. World Bank, World Development Report 2001, pp. 12–14. 5. International Labour Organization (ILO), Economically Active Population Estimates. 6. Fallon and Tzannatos, Child Labor. 7. World Bank, World Development Report 2001; U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, World Factbook 2001. 8. ILO, Economically Active Population Estimates. 9. For a focus on child well-being in Kenya, see Bradshaw, Buchmann, and Mbatia, “A Threatened Generation.” For a developing country focus on child wellbeing, see Bradshaw et al., “Borrowing Against the Future.” 10. Bradshaw, Buchmann, and Mbatia, “A Threatened Generation.” 11. World Bank, World Development Indicators 2002. 12. Ayittey, “The Looting of Africa,” p. 1. 13. Ibid. 14. Bradshaw et al., “Borrowing Against the Future”; Buchmann, “The Debt Crisis.” 15. Bradshaw et al., “Borrowing Against the Future.” 16. McMichael, Development and Social Change. 17. United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), The State of the World’s Children 1990, p. 1. 18. Coulombe and Canagarajah, Child Labor and Schooling in Ghana. 19. Fallon and Tzannatos, Child Labor. 20. Bradshaw and Wallace, Global Inequalities, p. 76. 21. Ibid. 22. Ayittey, “The Looting of Africa,” p. 1. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. U.S. Department of State, 1999 Country Reports. 26. Newswire, “Case Studies.” 27. For complete discussion, see Bradshaw and Wallace, Global Inequalities. 28. New York Times (Swarns), “A Hint.” 29. In reality, many of these long-term African leaders have been helped along by the support of other governments. During the Cold War period, foreign aid was offered in exchange for political alliance, even when African governments were known to be repressive or corrupt—for example, the United States and France consistently supported Mobutu in Zaire. 30. McMichael, Development and Social Change. 31. The African Union is modeled after the European Union and hopes to create an army, a regional parliament, and a central bank, but some obstacles remain.

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Just twenty-one of fifty-three member states paid dues in 2001, making it difficult to achieve a basic democratic initiative of observing elections. The Democratic Republic of Congo is still unstable. 32. Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States. 33. International Labour Organization (ILO), International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labour (SIMPOC), Every Child Counts. This estimate is probably low because the lines blur between soldier and civilian in the areas of prostitution and forced labor, especially as they relate to conflict areas. In sub-Saharan Africa, an additional estimated 210,000 children are engaged in forced labor and another 50,000 children are engaged in prostitution and pornography. 34. New York Times (Lacey), “In Burundi Schools.” 35. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (Lustig), “AIDS in Africa.” 36. ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, Every Child Counts. 37. Ibid. 38. World Health Organization, World Health Report 1999. 39. See ibid. 40. BBC, “AIDS Demo by Ethiopian Orphans.” 41. See World Health Organization, World Health Report 1999. 42. Cable News Network (Christensen), “AIDS in Africa.” 43. ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, Every Child Counts. 44. ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, IPEC Country Profile: United Republic of Tanzania. 45. See Grier, “Invisible Hands”; Reynolds, “Children in Zimbabwe”; and Levine, “‘Picannin’ Wages.” 46. World Bank, World Development Report 2002. 47. Ayittey, “The Looting of Africa.” 48. New York Times (Worth), “Ghana Sees Orderly City.” 49. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. 50. New York Times (Stevenson), “Africa Wants Free Trade.” 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Signatories are not listed, because the agreements are not legally binding. 54. Data were not available for all countries, including Somalia. 55. Qvortrup, “Childhood as a Social Phenomenon,” p. 31. 56. Fuller, Growing-Up Modern, p. xvi. See also Fuller and Caldwell, “Education in Southern Africa.” 57. U.S. Department of State, 1999 Country Reports.

4 Unequal Terrain: Rural vs. Urban Child Labor

The Country. Fourteen-year-old Buberwa has been working on a tea plantation in Tanzania since he was seven years old. He moved to a village near the plantation with his parents. Buberwa works full-time, but began working part-time in order to pay his school fees when he was younger. He dropped out of school in the fourth grade.1 The City. A girl from Mali notes, “In town we have money, we learn to cook, we watch television, listen to the radio—we are informed. We wash regularly with soap and we put moisturizer on our skin. We closely follow our employers’ examples. People give us clothes—we are suddenly more awake.”2 The definition of childhood differs in rural and urban areas, and by social class and sometimes ethnicity within those areas. In this chapter, I first examine the underlying social and cultural factors that shape a particular rural or urban construction of childhood and then discuss how children’s work represents different household survival strategies. In Western countries, changing demographic and socioeconomic factors are generally agreed to be the salient ingredients that fueled the emergence of childhood as a unique stage of life. Historical research has established a link in Western European societies between the emergence of childhood as a distinct, protected stage of life reserved for learning and play, and the surfacing of the nuclear family form.3 More recent economic perspectives on the emergence of childhood in the Western context refine this perspective by contending that the emergence of industrial capitalism has affected work patterns and the demand for child labor, which in turn have reversed the direction of wealth flows within families and our conceptualization of childhood.4

73

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Child Labor

The change in the conceptualization of childhood to a more protected stage has been explained by fundamental changes in the “value of children” over time with a coinciding shift in the fertility rate. A transition from high fertility to low fertility is “associated with a change in the direction of ‘intergenerational flows of wealth.’ In pre-transition populations ‘wealth’ tends to flow from children to parents.”5 In high-fertility societies parents typically make few educational investments in children, whereas in lowfertility societies parents generally make large investments of education and support in their children. According to the wealth-flows model, children are considered to be wealth because of the social prestige that they provide for the heads of large families. In Western Europe, the shift from the familial mode of production to the labor market mode of production undermined the economic power of kin networks. Prior to industrial capitalism, children were viewed as desired objects. With industrial capitalism, children came to be viewed as expensive commodities. The conceptualization of childhood therefore changes when demographic and socioeconomic conditions are altered. The conceptualization of childhood reflects parents’ child-rearing choices and society’s expectations for what children should be doing on a daily basis. Childhood as we know it is far from being a universal concept, and the experience of growing up in different cultures is informed by parents’ ideas of children. In urban African societies, childhood has taken on meanings that are more similar to the Western than the rural African context. This causes us to question under what circumstances a similarly “constructed” period of childhood emerges within a culture and how this might be different from one African culture to another. This difference that we see today between rural and urban areas appears to be correlated with the emergence of wage labor. The Pare ethnic group in rural Tanzania has experienced a shift in its thinking about what childhood is and what a child is expected to do.6 Historically, the Pare people have worked as highland cultivators in a patrilineal society, wherein land and authority are generally transferred from fathers to sons. In recent years, the Pare people have undergone a shift in their subsistence base from hoe cultivation to wage labor, which in turn has brought about a shift away from reliance on lineage authority. An increasing land shortage has further undermined the authority of lineage. As fathers are forced to divide dwindling landholdings among their sons, the resulting small plots are insufficient to provide an adequate livelihood for a subsistence family farm. Consequently, men supplement their farm earnings by taking wage employment. This shift has been accelerated during the current generation, but has been gradually building upon itself for several generations.7 Fathers no longer hold as much decisionmaking power over their children in terms of selecting a child’s spouse, because their children are no

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75

longer beholden to their fathers to obtain a plot of farmland. Many young men leave the highland area for an urban region in order to earn a wage income in the labor market. In the African context, most employment for wages takes place predominantly in urban or suburban areas. A young Pare man typically secures employment, establishes himself in the urban area, and then begins to save money so that he can start a family in the rural area. The young man then marries and keeps both rural and urban residences, and has his wife maintain the rural household, which is considered to be his home. He will most likely return to the rural homestead to retire. Some men establish urban and rural marriages. This pattern of migration to enter the wage economy has altered the division of labor between men and women in migrant families. As a result, women have more economic independence and autonomy in the highland area. Women are often completely responsible for running the family farm and selling most of its products. The exception is coffee, over which men retain responsibility for taking to market. A migrant man’s main contribution is the cash that he sends home from the city. While the lineage system remains, it is much weakened by the wage economy. Additionally, the seniority system has been weakened by the wage economy, because most sons who migrate are better educated and earn more than their fathers. The survival of the family is more dependent on the monetary contributions from the wage economy than on land provided by fathers. Consequently, fathers have less control over their sons’ decisions. Sons have more voice in their marriage partners and more say as to when they will marry. More often, the son pays the bridewealth to the bride’s family. Previously, bridewealth had been paid by the potential groom’s lineage elders. This shift of bridewealth payment from the older generation to the younger and the increased earning potential of the younger generation together have given young people more independence in choosing their marital partners. Polygyny exists, but has become rare in families who have become dependent on the migrant wage labor of their male children. The shift away from lineage-based family forms to nuclear family forms has reshaped marital relationships. Lineage-based family forms tend to derive authority through seniority and lineage, whereas nuclear family forms have couple-centered relations referred to as partnership marriages.8 Lineage-based family forms have higher fertility than nuclear family forms. Finally, lineage-based family forms have a concept of childhood similar to that found in Europe in the period prior to urbanization and industrial capitalism, as discussed in Chapter 2, whereas nuclear family forms share a concept of childhood similar to that of parents found in wage employment in industrial capitalist Europe. With the influence of the wage economy in Pare society, couples in partnership marriages reduce fertility and adopt a new view of children that differs from the traditional.

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The daily lives of children differ depending on these two conceptualizations of childhood. Couple-centered or partnership marriages have emerged in those situations where earnings are available in the wage economy from migrant labor and when the marriage is a result of free choice between bride and groom. Lineage-based families still exist, but less so among those families touched by the earnings from migrant labor.9 Among the Pare men in partnership marriages, all had been ruralurban migrants at one point in their lives, compared with less than onethird of men in traditional lineage-based families. For lineage-based families, lineage still determines inheritance rights for land through a bloodline, which is an important but weakening social institution in rural areas. Those rural-urban migrants who take part in the urban cash economy then foster a new type of partnership or nuclear family form in the rural and urban areas, which exists often alongside the more traditional lineage-based family form. Thus the rural-urban divide is not always absolute. While the gap between rural and urban exists between the subsistence agriculture and the postcolonial cash economy, people adapt to partnership models of the family in rural areas when there are cash inputs from the urban cash economy. Many families across Africa should be viewed as bridging both economies and trying to provide for their members. These two types of families also often pattern two distinct parental perspectives on what childhood should be.10 Parents in lineage-based families are more likely to reside in rural areas and tend to value their children as necessary for immediate labor and as insurance for old age. In contrast, parents in partnership-marriage families are more likely to reside in urban areas or depend on remittances from the urban economy and tend to view their children as a means of enjoyment and pleasure. Parents in partnershipmarriages also tend to value formal schooling as an important investment in their children. People who live in urban areas of Africa are increasingly likely to enter partnership marriages, but not all marriages in urban areas follow this scheme. A transition from lineage-based to partnership-based marriage should therefore be viewed as taking place gradually across several generations. The concept of childhood is rooted in the different economies that support families. These economies differ from rural to urban areas, and in a parallel pattern from lineage-based or land-based families to partnership or couple-centered families. When children are no longer tied to the wishes of their parents because they earn money in the wage economy, the lineagebased system is often turned on its head. The result is a divergence of concepts of childhood from rural to urban areas, but the points of transition provide a prism of different conceptualizations of childhood across both landscapes.

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77

Child Labor in Urbanizing Sub-Saharan Africa Rates of child labor differ from rural to urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa. Rural areas are often characterized as being devoid of educational infrastructure and as having parents who use their children’s labor to meet the family production needs in agrarian work. In rural Ethiopia, 34 percent of children work, compared to just 11 percent in urban areas.11 In Tanzania, one in three rural children work compared with one in ten children residing in urban areas.12 While most children (60 percent) do not work in Kenya, there appears to be a rural-urban divide in the opportunities available to children (see Table 3.1). The rate of urban children who work is nearly double that for rural children.13 In rural areas, children may work, or work and attend school contemporaneously. Urbanization has taken place at an accelerated rate in sub-Saharan Africa since 1960. The data shown in Table 4.1 provide a tabular perspective on this, and the maps shown in Figure 4.1 provides a visual representation of where these shifts have been more pronounced. In 1960, which was the year of independence for many sub-Saharan African countries, only one country, South Africa, had more than 40 percent of its population living in urban areas. In contrast, in 1999 twelve of forty African countries had 40 percent or more of their populations living in urban areas. Among regions within sub-Saharan Africa, western Africa has been most heavily affected by the migration of people from rural to urban areas. Other research has documented that the level of income of geographic regions around the globe corresponds roughly with the level of urbanization. This pattern is found to hold even when income is measured in alternative ways, such as gross national product (GNP) per capita or gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.14 However, this pattern has not been found to hold for the sub-Saharan African region, because GNP per capita has not increased at a rate that would coincide with the highest rates of annual urban growth, 5 percent. In other words, the shift to a cash economy is not the only factor that has fueled rural-urban migration in Africa. In several countries, the postcolonial experience has brought economic decline. In Zambia, for example, everyone works but fewer people work in the wage economy, so it is not necessarily income growth or wage employment that has fueled rural-urban migration.15 Both urban bias in public services and natural population growth have been offered as explanations for rapidly urbanizing sub-Saharan African countries.16 While the demographic transition model of the Western experience is relevant for explaining the changing value of children among the Pare ethnic group of Tanzania, it should be applied with caution and is one of several relevant factors. Similar to the Western model, a demographic shift to fewer children was hastened by the increasing dependence on and exposure

78 Table 4.1

Distribution of African Population by Urban Area, 1960 and 1999

Angola Benin Botswana Burkina Faso Burundi Cameroon Central African Republic (CAR) Chad Congo, Democratic Republic (DRC) Congo, Republic (Brazzaville) Côte d’Ivoire Ethiopia Eritrea Gabon Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Kenya Liberia Lesotho Madagascar Malawi Mali Mauritania Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda Senegal Sierra Leone Somalia South Africa Sudan Tanzania Togo Uganda Zambia Zimbabwe

Percentage Urban, 1960

Percentage Urban, 1999

10 10 NA 5 2 14 23 7 16 33 19 6 NA NA NA 23 10 NA 7 21 2 11 4 11 3 4 NA 6 13 2 23 13 17 47 10 5 10 5 23 13

34 42 50 18 9 48 41 23 30 62 46 17 18 80 32 38 32 23 32 NA 27 27 24 29 56 39 30 20 43 6 47 36 NA 50 35 32 33 14 40 35

Sources: World Bank, World Development Report 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 162–164; World Bank, World Development Report 1980 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1980), pp. 148–149. Notes: Percentages are based on different national definitions of what is “urban.” Crosscountry comparisons should be made with caution. For national definitions of urban areas, see United Nations, Demographic Yearbook 1993 (New York: United Nations, 1995), notes to tab. 6. NA = Not available.

79 Figure 4.1

Distribution of African Population by Urban Area, 1960 and 1999

1960

Percentage Living in Urban Areas

1999

0–20 21–39 40–100 Data unavailable

Sources: World Bank, World Development Report 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001), pp. 162–164; World Bank, World Development Report 1980 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1980), pp. 148–149. Notes: No data available for Somalia, Swaziland, Liberia, and Equatorial Guinea. Percentages are based on different national definitions of what is “urban.” Cross-country comparisons should be made with caution. For national definitions of urban areas, see United Nations, 1993 Demographic Yearbook, notes to table 6 (NY: United Nations, 1995).

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to wage labor in the cash economy. The increases in cash income for young Pare men have reshaped the power dynamics within families and allowed young people to choose their own partners. The resulting marriages tend to take a more couple-centered form with lower fertility levels and higher investments in children. In this case, it is not necessarily urbanization, but the higher cash incomes that are available in urban areas compared with rural ones that facilitate demographic and social change in family life and concepts of childhood. People residing in urban areas or those connected to urban areas through remittances are more likely to have higher incomes. Higher incomes translate into lower rates of child labor. Data from Chapter 3 show that child labor is highest in sub-Saharan African countries with low average income, higher proportions of their total population living in rural areas, and higher proportions of their national income derived from agricultural production. The proportion of children working is lower in countries with higher rates of urbanization. Because most of children’s work is rural labor, countries with proportionally larger rural populations are also likely to have higher rates of child labor. Also, children in rural areas are more likely to live in low-income households, again increasing their likelihood of work. Urban bias resulting in fewer educational alternatives in rural areas also explains why a higher proportion of children work in countries with lower urbanization rates. Additionally, children from rural areas are likely to come from households that are tied to the land, retain lineagebased family forms, and exhibit higher levels of fertility. Children from families with many children are more likely to work. More of these lineage-based family forms are found in rural compared to urban areas. For example, urbanized countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, Botswana, Gabon, and South Africa, all report rates of child labor that are less than 20 percent. As more people become integrated into the cash economy in employment for wages, it can be expected that the value of children will change as it did among the Pare ethnic group of Tanzania. This shift often accompanies urbanization, but as the Pare example shows, it can be a distant consequence of the urban sector wage employment that rural families come to depend upon in the form of remittances. Parents will increasingly have fewer children and subsequently invest more in those children educationally. While it may appear to be directly related to urbanization, the shift in rural areas is probably an ancillary consequence. The shift in thinking about children differently is a gradual process for parents. A change in parents’ definition of childhood may not be as swift in rural compared with urban areas because of urban bias. Alternative investments such as formal schooling for children may differ in rural and urban areas. Therefore, the shift from labor market activities to formal schooling for children unfolds at varying rates. For example, in Madagascar, children

Rural vs. Urban Child Labor

Case in Point 4.1 Tanzania The rural-urban gap and children’s lives

Poverty is the main reason that child labor exists in Tanzania. In comparison to over forty other sub-Saharan African countries, Tanzania ranks in the top quarter of those having the highest rates of child labor. Based on 2001 data, over one-fourth (27 percent) of households live in abject poverty, which means that they live without sufficient income to meet basic nutritional requirements.17 About two-thirds of the total population reside in rural areas, and poverty is more prevalent in rural than in urban areas. Roughly six in ten households (57 percent) do not have adequate income to provide basic needs, and about one-third of households do not have adequate income to provide food for their members. An economic downturn and poor harvests during the 1990s have resulted in even more income inequality between rural and urban areas, and also increased migration from the former to the latter. The educational system in Tanzania is characterized by quality and infrastructure problems, and these problems are exacerbated in rural areas. The primary school enrollment rate is 48 percent (see Table 5.1), which is lower than it was in 1980, and many rural children attend school sporadically. About 30 percent drop out before finishing the seven years of required primary school. The quality of education is so poor that only 6 percent of rural children continue with secondary school. Thus, rural children have become increasingly ill-equipped to compete in the urban cash economy for wages, yet the depressed continues

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Case in Point 4.1 continued state of the rural economy pulls more children into work. Underfunded education and high dropout rates in rural areas further widen the gap between urban and rural children. Another factor that channels children into early employment is the HIV/AIDS pandemic. AIDS has orphaned over 500,000 children in Tanzania, and it is likely that one-fourth of the country’s adult population will die from AIDS during the next fifteen years. Older orphaned children often work to support younger siblings. The educational system suffers as teachers become sick and die and orphans try to attend school despite their parental losses. Children continue to work in subsistence and commercial agriculture and in mining, sometimes without their parents. Many girls who have migrated from rural to urban areas work as "house girls" or domestic servants. Both girls and boys from poor households are found in market selling, in craft trades, and in manual labor. Children have been increasingly found in work associated with exploitation. More and more girls under age fifteen work as prostitutes, and boys are sometimes recruited to work as drug dealers in urban and suburban areas. In general, children in rural areas of Tanzania are involved in work that is less troublesome than the work of children in urban areas. The higher rates of poverty and lower educational opportunities together fuel increased inequality between rural and urban areas, and the injection of additional rural children into urban work.

with rural parents often work as they complete formal schooling in urban areas, because they retain the rural concept of childhood.18 Children with urban-based parents experience a more Western form of childhood in that they do not generally work while attending school. Also, the shift from labor market activities to formal schooling for children unfolds at varying rates in urban areas, because many rural-urban migrants residing in urban areas still live by more traditional cultural norms.

Rural and Urban Child Labor Across the Continent Much like the conceptualization of childhood differs from rural to urban areas, the amount and type of work that children do vary. While one in

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three children work in sub-Saharan Africa, most of these children are found in the agricultural sector in rural areas. In urban areas, children tend to work primarily in domestic services, and to lesser extents in market vending, apprenticeships, manufacturing, and construction. Even though urban street children receive considerable attention, most children work in agriculture in rural areas and domestic service in urban areas.

Types of Rural Child Labor In rural areas, 90 percent of children who work participate in agriculture or agricultural activities.19 In this section, I examine the rural work of children in subsistence farming and then compare this work with the rural work of children in commercial agriculture and mining. I next examine the fostering of children from rural areas, which leads to their migration into jobs in the urban economy. I first profile each type of employment and then examine the child’s likely household environment in terms of dependence on the cash economy, urban-bias indicators such as level of educational infrastructure or level of income, and whether their parents hail from a lineage or couple-centered relationship, taking into account fertility levels of their parents and decisionmaking inside the household whenever possible. Subsistence farming with kin. A study of the Tonga people of Zambia from the mid-1980s shows that children in subsistence agriculture provide substantial contributions to rural households. Children who work with their families work hard and many work long hours, especially girls, but children who continue to work alongside their parents are treated much better than children who are sold or leased into commercial farming away from the supervision of family members. The work and lives of girls and boys diverge in middle childhood. Among the Tonga people, rural girls are taught by their mothers to be farmers and servants in the kinship network. If the girls resist work, they are punished. Nyangu, a thirteen-year-old girl, explains, “I saw Emeria being beaten by her mother because she refused to go to the field.” Changu, a fourteenyear-old girl, describes, “Mother beat me for not working and I was very angry. I didn’t eat anything, I just ate sadza in the evening. Myself, I didn’t beat her because she is older than me. It is not possible to beat a mother.” Zvaipa, a thirteen-year-old girl, notes, “It was on Sunday when mother beat me because I refused to wash plates. After beating me she told me to go and wash them. After that mother did not beat me at all.”20 Another comment by Zvaipa shows how she accepts her role as provider of domestic duties and farming work: Today I went to wash plates in the morning. Before I even left for school and after I had dried the plates, I started grinding sorghum.

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When I came from school I cooked sadza for my brothers and myself. After eating I went to wash plates again. When I came from washing plates I went to grind. After grinding, I fetched water from the stream for my brothers to wash and for my father also.21 The training of these girls is a form of social reproduction, as mothers teach daughters what they need to know in order to be sought after as attractive mates in the rural Tonga society of Zambia. Each of these girls will need to master management of the home and tending of the fields. These girls are being trained to perform the daily work of women. If they attend school, it is generally a secondary priority to their training in the work and management of the family farm. As these three rural girls make the transition to adulthood, they will likely drop out of school by the age of sixteen and become engaged to an older man who has been selected by male kinsmen. Their decisions to leave school are not seen as a loss, for their work in subsistence farming and domestic service is not viewed as requiring the skills taught in formal schooling. Male Tonga children also work in the fields during middle childhood, but they have more time for leisure activities than their female counterparts from age eleven to age fourteen. A good example is that of Zvaipa’s brother, Taitos, who is fourteen years old. He writes in his diary: I started the day with preparation of going to re-plant the seeds. Today we were re-planting maila and nzembwe. I worked in the field for about three hours when I came back home from the field. When we arrived home I saw my sister Zvaipa busy working. She was preparing our lunch. Before lunch we drank tea with bread. When I finished eating my lunch I went to the store. To the store I saw my friends and we talked about weeding and re-planting of seeds in our fields. After that I went to Chiweshe to see Chipo or Kanense!22 Whereas girls tended to fantasize about food, boys recount adventures and happy play moments in their diaries. Nakamu, an eleven-year-old boy, writes, “Today I had sadza and chicken, yesterday I played football, after finishing eating I went to sleep. During the holiday I will go to Kariba. Tomorrow I will go to Bumi. These two thoughts make me happy. Tomorrow I will go to Karoi by bus. My best friends are M. and J. We all play together.”23 Girls are perceived as being able to acquire the skills that they need from working alongside their mothers. Indeed, school is a more prominent

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activity for boys than for girls during middle childhood. Formal education is viewed as potentially dangerous for girls, as it could lead to insubordination vis-à-vis men and promiscuity. Another girl, fourteen-year-old Siabika, recounts a story regarding the perils of educating girls: There was a pretty girl named Tambudzai. This Tambudzai was very clean and smart. . . . One day Tambudzai’s husband asked if she would like to go to school. When Tambudzai heard that she was very happy. Tambudzai’s husband took her to school and she did form six. After some years Tambudzai told her husband that she would like to see what Harare looks like. When they reached Harare Tambudzai divorced her husband. Tambudzai married another boy.24 The narratives of these Tonga children provide a glimpse into their rural work lives and childhoods. Their parents are involved in subsistence farming, and these children are products of lineage-based or arranged marriages, characterized by male autonomy, frequent polygyny, and high fertility. Urbanization and work for wages in the cash economy are not yet a part in their lives. While education is open to both boys and girls, rural girls are absent from school more often because of household work responsibilities. In rural areas across sub-Saharan Africa, child labor is vital to women, who generally control the work of children. The burden of running a household, farming, and feeding a family has increased for many rural women. Research on rural household labor in Zimbabwe in 1991 found that children’s contributions to the household labor supply were significant. Parents reported that children did 28 percent of the weeding work, 35 percent of the planting work, and 51 percent of the harvesting work on average in the subsistence farm setting.25 At the same time, children’s farm labor has begun to be reduced as they are increasingly expected to attend formal schooling, even in rural areas. Also, while this is not evident in the case of the Tonga people, men’s field labor is often absent in rural households because men migrate to work for cash on larger commercial farms in other rural areas and in the informal sector economy in urban areas. In the case of the Tonga people, as is the case of most rural children, their labor is expected in varying degrees by the larger household resources available in terms of landownership, social capital, and level of family earnings. This is the case across sub-Saharan Africa. Support for the idea that the household is important in what learning and work opportunities are available for children is also found in rural Sudan, where a process of social reproduction within the household context largely determines the learning and knowledge that are available to children.26 While examination of children through the lens of the household unit has been criticized

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because it often hides women’s tactics, work, and interhousehold cooperation,27 it is useful because the household context often provides and inhibits opportunities for them. Only through the stratification structures that shape their childhood experiences can we perceive these children as social agents. Commercial agriculture. Cash crops in sub-Saharan Africa include such products as coffee, tea, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, and cashews cultivated in a plantation environment. Their existence today is tied to their introduction by a European colonial administration. For example, tobacco was first introduced in the early twentieth century by the British colonial administration, and is grown today in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi, and to a lesser extent in Uganda and Tanzania. 28 Coffee is grown in Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Uganda, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Kenya, and Cameroon.29 Côte d’Ivoire is the largest exporter of cocoa in the world. Groundnuts such as peanuts or cashews are major exports from Mali and Senegal. Children in rural areas of Tanzania participate in commercial agriculture because they need to help support the family budget, there is a shortage of arable land, and the weak educational structure cannot sustain them in formal schooling. Work in commercial agriculture is arduous. Children who end up here often have parents with little or no landholdings. These children have not been selected for the choice seats in secondary school, which involve migrating to an urban area. Even if they were to earn a seat in secondary school, their parents would probably not have the means to pay for it. These children often do not have the social capital that might secure them an apprenticeship in the urban informal sector economy. Work in commercial agriculture is a viable alternative for poor households in rural Tanzania. Samson is a typical child worker on a tobacco plantation. Both boys and girls work on tobacco plantations, although boys compose a larger portion of the work force, 60 percent. Samson lives with his parents and many children on a tobacco plantation in Urambo, Tanzania. He is now 15 years old, but has been working on one particular plantation for six years. Following the same pattern as his brothers and sisters, he began working to pay for his school fees. Once he finished his primary school certificate, he began working full-time as do a vast majority of children in rural areas. By the age of 15, Samson now works 10 to 12 hour days and is paid weekly. He is paid directly and is allowed to buy a few things that he wants, and then gives the rest to his parents for food and basic household goods. He carries out a wide array of work tasks, which include cutting down trees, weeding, preparing fields for cultivation, trans-

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planting tobacco seedlings, and plucking and curing leaves. By age 15, Samson shows wear from this arduous work. He works barefoot and is often scratched by thorns. His back hurts from carrying bags of tobacco leaves the 5 kilometers to the weighing station. There is no safe drinking water on the plantation, so he frequently suffers from diarreah [sic] and typhoid. He appears to be anemic and has burn scars on his arms. When he gets sick, his medical expenses are deducted from his salary.30 Even though Samson completed primary school, he is not among the precious few, just 6 percent in rural areas, who continue with secondary school training.31 His wages go in large part toward sustaining his parents’ household. He is one of many children. Lineage-based elders probably arranged his parents’ marriage. Mining. Children were known to work in mines during colonial times and continue to do so in Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone in western Africa, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in eastern and southern Africa. Often, children live and work away from family members, an arrangement that leaves them without supervision and often makes them more vulnerable to exploitation. Historical studies of the picannins, eight- to ten-year-old boys who worked in various aboveground jobs in colonial Zimbabwe, demonstrates how mining may be necessary work on the one hand and hazardous on the other, especially when children are separated from their parents. Some of these picannins carried out benign tasks such as cooking or carrying equipment and supplies, while others were sodomized and used as sexual partners.32 More recent accounts of boy soldiers forced to work in diamond mines and coerced to become soldiers for the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) insurrection movement in Sierra Leone provide supporting evidence as to how exploitative mining work can be. The experience of Tumijisho provides a window on difficult mine work: Tumijisho, one of seven brothers and sisters, is only fifteen years old yet works full time at a gold mine. His father died when he was in standard five, at which point he dropped out of school because his mother could no longer afford to pay the school fees. He currently lives with his mother in a village near the mine. In his work at the mine, Tumijisho is expected to dig and carry gold ore and mud from the mining pits so that it can be sieved. He is paid in cash at the end of his seven-hour-a-day job. Tumijisho has a younger sister, a thirteen-year-old, who works at a food stall ten hours a day.33

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This child who works in the artisanal gold mines of Tanzania comes from a lineage-based family with high fertility, and unfortunately suffered the death of his father, an event that can be devastating for wives and children left behind. Tumijisho attributes his dropping out of school to his father’s death and mother’s subsequent lack of income; his is a typical case when compared to national statistics on children’s dropout rates in Tanzania. First, gross enrollment rates tend to overstate the number of children who attend school. Further, many poor children in rural areas only attend school sporadically, roughly 30 percent drop out of school before finishing the seven years of compulsory primary-level education, and just 6 percent of Tanzanian children continue to secondary school.34 Like many children, Tumijisho should be viewed as a product of the poverty that is frequently found in rural Africa. Fostering: Rural children who work away from their parents. The fostering relationships that serve to place rural children in urban work are well established. Indeed, children are readily moved between rural and urban settings for many reasons. In the postcolonial era in sub-Saharan Africa, rural children are often placed in the home of an extended urban family member to learn a trade, receive a religious or secular education, or help out the urban extended family. In these cases, the preexisting social relationships within the extended kin network provide opportunities in the more affluent urban area while reinforcing kinship ties and establishing a foothold for siblings and others in the urban setting. Increasingly, rural parents with few social resources also arrange for their children to be fostered to pseudokin and nonkin in urban areas. Girls are often fostered to work as domestic servants, while boys often take apprenticeship work. Fostered girls and boys are also found, to a lesser extent, working in informal sector jobs such as vending or begging. These fostering relationships provide an excellent example of how a household short of economic resources, which is typical of a rural household, can use social relationships to secure training opportunities for its children. The social relationships translate into opportunities and money for rural families. The child may receive little or no salary, but the employer generally bears the responsibility of rearing him or her. The employer pays for the fostered child’s daily needs of food and clothing, and the fostered child sleeps in the employer’s household in cases of domestic or informal sector work, or else in the workshop with other apprentices. A boy who enters an apprenticeship comes from a rural area and is sponsored by an extended family member. An employer may recruit boys from his ancestral village. This kin member may be referred to as an “uncle,” but the meaning for this term in the sub-Saharan African context should be clarified. An apprentice may call a village elder or his father’s

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blood-related brother “uncle.” For the apprentice in the workshop setting, “A young worker need not be a ‘nephew’; he may . . . be the nephew of a friend,” yet he is called nephew in the workshop setting.35 In this way, the community ties shared by individuals from the same village translate into created nonblood kinship ties, which are quite strong. 36 Research in Senegal of boy apprentices and girl domestics in western Africa found that these socially constructed nonfilial kinship ties established through shared experiences, such as circumcision, are often marshaled to place a rural child in the urban setting. The cases presented in Chapter 6—of Hadji, Mariama, and Rafine, the domestic workers and sellers, and Thiam, the shoe apprentice—all demonstrate fostering situations. Fostering relationships are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Not all fostered children view themselves as part of a larger household plan. In cases of lengthy separations from their parents, children can feel somewhat abandoned in the urban milieu and emotionally distant from their family. This can be very destabilizing for the reciprocity and dependency that keep the rural African families together. For example, a boy such as Thiam, the shoe apprentice, may be expected by his parents to return to a smaller town near the family once his apprenticeship is completed, and support the family as part of a long-term household adaptive strategy. However, young boys like Thiam live with their urban employers away from their families for several years with little rural and familial contact. Once the apprenticeship is complete, most children want to stay in the urban area. Many third-year apprentices do not feel the same obligation to their rural families compared to first-year apprentices who have similar background. One apprenticed shoemaker explains his reasons for preferring the urban setting: “The rural area is dirty and difficult. There is no running water.” 37 However, most apprentices cannot afford to abandon familial monetary obligations once they are trained, because their future labor supply will likely come from their rural area. There evolves, then, a reciprocal relationship of obligation. One twentysix-year-old employer explains, “I go to my village and do not have to ask parents, but they ask me to train their children. They know that I do good work.”38 In other cases, kinship terms can serve as camouflage for highly exploitative child labor situations. For example, in Nigeria, fostering traditionally has been part of traditional custom as a way for poor or low-status parents to secure a place for their children in an economically and morally high-status household. At times, even chiefs send their children to the homes of poor people who have shown attractive traits such as strong character and valor. This tradition has changed such that in present-day Nigeria, parents often work through agents—with some or perhaps no social or kinship relation to the village or family—in order to place their children for a

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specified period of time in domestic and commercial agricultural work. The parents are paid up-front and may never see their children again. A mixture of motives on the part of parents and even agents, mostly the drive to escape abject poverty, colludes to place children in highly exploitative and sometimes slavelike conditions.39 As children, some agents themselves were once sold by their parents into bonded labor, so the cycle replicates itself. The child has little say in the matter, and the realization that the child has been sold into bonded labor is not communicated to him or her. An International Labour Organization survey in 2000 suggests that about 40 percent of street and working children have been trafficked. These children are then passed off as distant rural kin to outsiders and are often referred to as “niece” or “nephew.” Longitudinal data from a Benin village show that children are increasingly leaving rural areas through arrangements outside the customary kinship pattern of securing opportunities for children. For example, the percentage of children leaving with a relative decreased from 62 percent in 1996 to 46 percent in 1999. Countering this trend, the percentage of children leaving with a stranger increased from 18 percent to 27 percent over the same period, and those children who left with a friend of the family increased from 19 percent to 25 percent.40 Much as is found in other western African countries, the concepts of “relation” or “parent” can also refer to friends, friends of friends, or simply another villager. Children are also trafficked from rural to urban areas, or from rural areas across country borders to both rural and urban areas (see Chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of child trafficking). Data from one village show that, in 2002, almost one in five (18 percent) of all children left, of whom 60 percent secured employment in Benin and 40 percent secured employment in neighboring countries.41 Both boys and girls from rural areas are recruited into urban domestic service in Benin and neighboring countries. Boys are also recruited to work on plantations in Benin, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire. Typically, boys are more likely to emigrate to find work than girls. Overall, children in rural areas work as a facet of social reproduction wherein parents teach them the skills they need to manage the household and tend the land in the case of subsistence agriculture. Poverty is the defining characteristic that predicts whether rural-based children will work in commercial agriculture, in mining, or as fostered children in urban areas. Rural children who are fostered in urban households often arrive with little human capital. For example, an overwhelming majority of children from the “sending regions,” like the Mopti region of Mali, have never attended primary school, 85 percent in this case. The proportion is even higher for girls. This lack of education translates into very limited employment opportunities outside of the rural area.42

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Types of Urban Child Labor Work in the urban setting is largely separated by gender. Domestic work is the most common form of urban employment for girls. Girls and boys both engage in vending in neighborhood markets and on the streets, but they generally sell different types of products. Boys are also engaged in apprenticeships to craftsmen and in construction. Domestic work. The urban domestic work of girls—known as mbindaan in Senegal, kalifa in Mali, and vidome ga in Benin—generally involves children brought from a rural area or from a very poor suburb near an urban area. The cases of Hadji, Mariama, and Rafine (see Chapter 6) are typical of domestic servants found in western Africa. It once was typical for children to be placed in the home of an extended family member for domestic work, but this is no longer the case. An increasing trend is that nonkin agents now comb rural villages setting up relationships with parents of little means, whom they offer advance payments toward domestic work to be performed by their children—which effectively may constitute child trafficking. A 1994 examination of 1,300 western African domestic workers of age eighteen or younger who live in Lomé, the capital city of Togo, found that a majority were younger than fourteen, the legal minimum age for employment in domestic work.43 The study found that, as in other sub-Saharan African countries, most of the domestic servants in Togo, 95 percent, were girls. Also similar to the larger pattern for domestic servants in the subSaharan African context, 67 percent were children of peasants still residing in the rural area. Much like fostering, 60 percent of these girls found their employment through an agent or intervening person, compared with 21 percent who found employment through an aunt or uncle, and only 5 percent who found employment themselves. The study found that girls who worked as maids were more likely to come from unstable families, whether poor households, households with too many dependents, or households that had experienced the death of a parent. Nearly seven in ten parents (69 percent) reported that their children were employed in domestic work because the family did not have enough money. Another 27 percent of parents reported that their children were employed because the family was very large, and 5 percent said their children worked because the family did not own land. Nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of domestic workers were orphans. In most cases, children in domestic work were regarded not as workers, but more likely as being fostered or helped. Just 7 percent of child domestic workers reported that their employers referred to them as “employees.” From eastern Africa, a Kenyan study shows that domestic work is the most common form of labor that children undertook to earn a living. In

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1987, domestic workers constituted 60 percent of all child workers. 44 Further, much like in Togo in western Africa, an overwhelming majority (95 percent) of domestic child workers in Kenya were female. This has not always been the case in eastern Africa, where houseboys were customarily used in colonial times. A shift to female roles in domestic work has been documented in Kenya and Zambia in the postcolonial context.45 Moreover, the pattern of children working and living with extended relatives in the urban area no longer holds in Kenya. Just 36 percent were working for relatives, while 64 percent were working for employers who were strangers at the commencement of the work relationship. Likewise, 51 percent were living with employers whom they did not know before the start of the work relationship. What used to be customary is now the exception in Kenya. Just one in five children (22 percent) who were employed by strangers continued to live with either their parents or blood relatives. Similar to the daily life of Hadji, Mariama, and Rafine in Senegal (see Chapter 6), nearly three-fourths (74 percent) of child domestic laborers documented in the Kenyan study started work between six and seven o’clock in the morning and finished between nine and ten o’clock at night. The remainder of children reported working an even longer day. Much like the life of a Senegalese domestic, children in Kenya are seldom paid directly for their domestic work: 17 percent reported being paid money for their work, while 59 percent reported being paid money, food, and clothes, and the remaining 24 percent reported being paid in kind with food and/or clothing. Much like Senegalese domestics, these Kenyan children are not given much free time; most reported working seven days a week (56 percent), and one-third reported that employers required them to work even while sick.46 In Kenya, the domestic child labor force is predominantly composed of rural children who migrate to urban areas to work with strangers, who often set their own work needs above the nurturance needs of these migrant children. While this work can be economically beneficial for a rural family of limited means, it provides the anonymous conditions in which children can be exploited. Market work. Children working in neighborhood markets in urban areas of western Africa are a common sight. Some sell goods in the urban market as an extension of their domestic work, while others work alongside their parents or as an extension of their parents’ earning potential. The case of Anta, a girl who participates in market selling and lives with her parents, comes from a regional city in Senegal: Anta is a twelve-year-old who sells hot peppers, onions, and bullion cubes from a tray while walking through an urban market in a

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regional city. Her mother also sells in the market but sells bread and sandwiches from a more established stall. Anta learned to sell in the market as an extension of her mother’s selling activities two years earlier. She is learning the skills necessary to take on the work of her mother, to whom Anta’s earnings are directly forwarded. Having never attended school, Anta learns the relative values of products and money through her work in the market. She does not completely understand arithmetic, so she memorizes the change amounts for the various products and the procedures for customers who buy on credit. Anta’s father, also a market vendor, has one wife, and Anta is the second-born of her parents. Her older sister stays home to prepare meals, clean the house, and take care of her three younger brothers and one sister. Having an older female sibling to do the housework is common among girls who sell in the market. One younger brother attends public elementary school and the other two brothers are still too young for school. Her younger sister is old enough for school, but stays home to help with the housework. With three members selling in the market, the family makes just enough to survive.47 Much like Anta, Ousmane is a Senegalese boy who sells goods in a neighborhood market as a learning opportunity and an extension of his father’s enterprise, and who eventually will take on the market-selling work of his father completely. His parents view his market work as essential training that will support them in their old age and allow Ousmane to establish his own family. Ousmane, a fourteen-year-old mobile hawker of school supplies such as paper, notebooks, and pens in the market, has been selling for three years. Ousmane’s father, who sells sewing supplies from an established stall, arranged for Ousmane’s business and oversees and profits from his selling. Like Anta, Ousmane has not attended primary school and will learn to count as part of his market training. This market training is extremely informal and involves his father teaching him various computations by rote so that he can make change for customers. Like Anta, he does not know how to read the numbers or words on coins and bills, but memorizes the worth by the size and shape. Ousmane is the oldest child of his father’s two wives. His mother is the first wife. His three younger brothers attend quranic school and his four younger sisters help with the housework rather than attending school. The household will sustain itself in the

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future through Ousmane’s and his brothers’ work. His father explains, “Once a child has three or four years of Koranic training, he has the teachings to learn the skills of the market. Once Ousmane has mastered his work (selling school supplies), he will help me in my stall and eventually become the patron along with his brothers. . . . I won’t have to work then.”48 In the urban setting, some rural children are cut off from their traditional household roles and domestic responsibilities, yet these children are often viewed as gaining valuable training that will sustain them in the future in such work as vending in the market setting. Once families make the move to an urban area, there is more outside pressure to place children in formal primary schooling, in part because formal schooling is widely available in urban areas. However, there are still families who are not established enough to do without the labor of their children, so they set them up in vending or entrepreneurial activities in market areas. Apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are considered training for children, especially those who have failed in the public school system. In some cases, the free labor of apprentices composes a large proportion of the labor force. For example, in Nigeria, 85 percent of the labor force in the leather industry consists of juvenile apprentices.49 Because their work is considered training, monetary payment is not expected in most cases. Generally, apprenticeship opportunities in skilled craft trades are only open to boys. Societal norms that dictate appropriate work for boys and girls structure the availability of occupations by sex, even for children from the same household. Boys are likely to be found in shoemaking, tailoring, metalworking, carpentry, or electrical repair. There is a hierarchy among apprenticeships, and generally families of greater economic resources can place their children in the shorter apprenticeships with the highest long-term economic returns. Thus there is a rural-urban divide again, wherein rural children generally of relatively poorer households end up in the lower-status, lowerduration apprenticeships. The cases detailed in Chapter 6, like those of Thiam the shoemaker and Momadou the tailor, profile the lives of these rural-urban migrants. The urban child who ends up in an apprenticeship represents a different type. In an urban setting, a male child begins his apprenticeship at age twelve or thirteen after reaching the final level of primary school. In this case, the child seeks an apprenticeship as an alternative form of education to that offered in the formal school system. If this child resides in an urban area with urban parents, it is generally the case that he has failed the primary school certificate exam or the secondary school entrance exam. His family seeks an apprenticeship in lieu of the public school system to pre-

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pare him for adult work. This child comes from a household that can afford to forgo short-term earnings in order to invest more training in the child. The case of Ablaye provides a sketch of this type of child worker: Ablaye, born in a downtown neighborhood of Dakar, Senegal, is now thirteen years old. He has worked in the market as an apprentice to a metalworker for one year. He works with five other children and the patron, or employer, from 8 A.M. until 6 or 7 P.M., while the sunlight permits. Ablaye eats lunch in the workshop, but eats the other two meals of the day in his father’s compound, where he also sleeps. In his four-year apprenticeship, he will learn basic welding and metalworking techniques that will allow him to set up his own workshop. He will also work as a journeyman for two years at the close of his apprenticeship to save money and build his own customer base. He earned his primary school certificate after attending the public elementary school in his neighborhood for seven years. He repeated the last level of primary school in hopes of meriting a place in secondary school. After [Ablaye failed to earn a place, his] father, a retired police officer for the city of Dakar, arranged an apprenticeship. Metalworking is a good trade that can provide for a family. If children in this household succeed at school, regardless of their sex, they can continue their education, because the household does not need their income or full-time housework to meet immediate needs. Ablaye failed. He is a middle child, the third-born of his mother, and the fourth-born of his father, who had another wife. His father’s oldest son still studies in the public school system. Ablaye’s mother does housework in the compound and has a total of five children. His older brother, Cheikh, works as an apprentice to a carpenter, his older sister still studies, and his two younger brothers study in primary school. Ablaye and Cheikh, who have both failed the public school system, have now been placed in apprenticeships as an alternative to the training and career preparation of education in the public school system. Their mother explains, “Ablaye and Cheikh are learning trades that are useful to the family and will allow them to marry someday.” In her mind, her boys are receiving adequate training to prepare them to support their own households in the future. This is an adaptive strategy used by the household to educate its children for future careers.50 Urban children who fail in the public school system still fare better than dropouts in rural areas. They enter higher-status positions and generally

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continue to live with their family so that their parents can monitor the conditions of their work situation.

Conclusion: Urbanization and Household Strategies There is a gap in income and in opportunity when traveling from rural to urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa. The postcolonial economic decline sets the backdrop for the increasing migration of rural families together and rural children alone to urban areas for work. As new pressures have been placed on rural and urban economies, households in both areas have become less benevolent and increasingly shrewd in their decisionmaking to sustain their members. Since independence movements swept across Africa in 1960, everyday life has become increasingly dependent on a cash economy, leaving many rural families out of the economic loop. Children’s work has become a conduit for many of these rural families to gain a foothold in the cash economy, which in turn has led to more children living with strangers or even on their own. The AIDS pandemic in central, eastern, and southern Africa creates more children on their own, because fewer adults are available in the immediate and extended family to care for orphaned children. All of these trends call the notion of economic development into question. For many in the developing world, child labor represents an alternative to formal schooling. Children’s work provides income for the household and varying levels of career training for the child worker. In this way, the children who take different types of work can also be viewed in relation to different household survival strategies. Children come from rural and urban households of different levels of income and social networks. Within households, gender further shapes divergent trajectories of opportunity for children, and this is even more pronounced in rural-background families. Thus, four dimensions of the parental household—rural or urban background, economic resources, social resources, and gender expectations— define survival strategies and highlight the stratification processes and relationships that influence how children come to work. Children represent strategies that households embrace in order to sustain themselves and educate their children. Some children continue to learn from their parents, in agricultural work in rural areas or in a skilled crafts trade in urban areas. Some urban households seek apprenticeship training for a child who has failed to advance in the public school system. Urban market work is a second chance for these children. Some children are ruralurban migrants learning a nonagricultural trade. Their work for training and wages represents an alternative to living off the vagaries of the land as their parents do.

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Households diversify the education and training of their children to create a more secure economic future, yet these strategies may have unforeseen long-term consequences. For example, some child workers act as anchors for future rural-urban migration and therefore represent social mobility for rural families. Another important consequence is the weakening of familial ties for those rural children who migrate to urban areas for work, especially in situations that involve lengthy separations from their families. The rural-urban divide and the economic divide continue to shape how childhood is viewed in both rural and urban areas. Rural and urban parents often define childhood differently, and these different meanings of childhood result in different expectations in formal schooling and work for children. Children work in both rural and urban areas, but most of those born and reared in the urban setting come from families who place a greater value on formal schooling and also have greater access to it compared with rural families. Working children in rural areas are generally engaged in farming and live with their families, whereas working children in urban areas may be urban migrants employed by distant kin or nonkin as domestic help. When children are placed in the labor market, it is a decision made as part of a household strategy—perhaps as economic necessity in the short term or as a planned career-training trajectory in the long term.

Notes 1. Gonza and Moshi, Tanzania Child Labour. 2. Quotation taken from domestic servant focus group conducted in Mopti, Mali, as cited in Castle, “The Trafficking of Children.” 3. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. 4. Caldwell, Theory of Fertility Decline. 5. Alter, “Theories of Fertility Decline,” p. 24. 6. Hollos, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood”; Hollos and Larson, “From Lineage to Conjugality.” 7. Maghimbi, “The Decline of the Economy.” 8. Hollos, “The Cultural Construction of Childhood”; Hollos and Larson, “From Lineage to Conjugality.” 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. U.S. Department of Labor, 2001 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor. 12. International Labour Organization (ILO), International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labour (SIMPOC), IPEC Country Profile: United Republic of Tanzania. 13. SIMPOC tabulations on Child Labour Module of the Integrated Labour Force Survey, 1998–1999. Administered by the ILO, IPEC Division.

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14. Gugler, The Urban Transformation. 15. Hansen, “Labor Migration and Urban Child Labor.” 16. Gugler, The Urban Transformation. 17. ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, IPEC Country Profile: United Republic of Tanzania. 18. Sharp, “The Work Ideology.” 19. ILO, Economically Active Population Estimates. 20. Reynolds, Dance Civet Cat, pp. 106–107. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Katz, “Children and the Environment.” 27. Oppong, Female and Male in West Africa; Guyer, “Household and Community in African Studies.” 28. Masudi et al., Tanzania Child Labour. 29. Nchahaga, Tanzania Children. 30. Masudi et al., Tanzania Child Labour, p. 7. 31. ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, IPEC Country Profile: United Republic of Tanzania. 32. Grier, “Invisible Hands.” 33. Adapted from Kadonya, Mtuana, and Madihi, Tanzania Child Labour. 34. ILO, IPEC, and SIMPOC, IPEC Country Profile: United Republic of Tanzania. 35. Morice, “Underpaid Child Labour,” p. 520. 36. Sow, “Muslim Families.” 37. Bass, Working for Peanuts, p. 83. 38. Ibid. 39. Ebigbo, Child Trafficking in Nigeria. 40. Kielland, “Child Labor Migration.” 41. Ibid. 42. Castle, “The Trafficking of Children.” 43. Adjeoda et al., Le travail des enfants. 44. Bwibo and Onyango, “Report of Child Labour and Health Research.” 45. Hansen, “Labor Migration and Urban Child Labor.” 46. Bwibo and Onyango, “Report of Child Labour and Health Research.” 47. Adapted from Bass, “Child Labor and Household Strategies.” 48. Ibid. 49. Morice, “Underpaid Child Labour.” 50. Adapted from Bass, “Child Labor and Household Strategies.”

5 Work and School: Coordination and Conflict

But there is another side, the “lemon,” and that is the inability or unwillingness (so far) of many developing country governments to reliably deliver even the most basic education package to the poor rural and urban periphery children who are precisely those most likely to work.1 If you give a man a fish, he will eat, once. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for the rest of his life. If you are thinking a year ahead, sow seed. If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree. If you are thinking a hundred years ahead, educate the people. By planting a tree, you will harvest tenfold. By educating the people, you will harvest one hundredfold.2 Whether child labor generates more conflict or more coordination between work and school in a developing country context is debatable. Child labor can be viewed as keeping children from participating in school. Conversely, the proceeds from children’s labor often can make the difference in being able to afford the costs of school. Even in situations where children’s families can afford the tuition, it is often the marginal costs—for purchasing books, supplies such as pencils and paper, and uniforms—that make the difference. An examination of national-level statistics for child labor and school attendance shows that school and work are not always mutually exclusive options. Of the estimated 28 percent of Ghanaian children who work, more than two-thirds of these children concurrently attend school. Sorting out which kids are unable to accomplish both allows us to understand the underlying roots of child labor as a social problem. The relationship between children’s work and school attendance is probably best understood by the structural differences, such

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as gender, rural or urban milieu, and household income, that often frame children’s opportunities. In Ghana, an overwhelming majority of children, 90 percent, help with household chores. This household work does not appear to be a major impediment to school attendance, because most children do attend school. However, there is still a gap between boys and girls, with three-fourths of the former compared to two-thirds of the latter receiving formal schooling.3 This gender gap is also found in children’s work. Girls as a group work longer hours on average than boys, and tend to work in different types of jobs.4 Because of cultural expectations, boys tend to work in wage labor whereas girls tend to work in domestic situations where little or no wages are earned. They earn less income and the time requirement of their labor directly competes with the ability to attend school and complete homework. Rural-urban differences are pronounced in Ghana. School attendance is much lower in rural than in urban areas, and rural children are much more likely to work than children living in urban areas. While 28 percent of children work overall, over 50 percent of rural children do so, mostly in unpaid family-based agriculture.5 The issue rests not in that rural children are more likely to work, though, but in that rural children tend to work in jobs that conflict with human capital accumulation or formal schooling.6 For rural children, lack of school facilities, poor-quality schools, irrelevance of education, and the costs associated with schooling all coalesce to push children into work. Much like in the rest of the world, household income in Ghana stands as a predictor of child labor.7 Children from the poorest of households are more likely to engage in work and less likely to attend school. The gender and rural-urban differences in child labor force participation are linked to poverty. The cultural norms that determine what is acceptable for girls and for boys differ by income levels, with girls in lower-income households participating in work that, due to its duration, makes school attendance unlikely and difficult. When parents must decide which children will attend school, boys generally get the nod over girls. In this way, girls are more likely than boys to be limited by the double bind of being rural and poor. This Ghanaian example demonstrates that work and school are not always competing objectives, and that their combination need not be problematic. This example also makes clear that the real puzzle is to identify in which situations child labor detracts from the human capital investment of education. In this chapter, I first examine the history, costs, and relevancy of formal schooling in sub-Saharan Africa, and then examine separately those who drop out of formal schooling and those who are able to combine it with work.

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History, Costs, and Relevancy of Formal Schooling in Sub-Saharan Africa The Influence of Colonial School Systems African societies have a long history of informal education, which has transmitted cultural identity and taught life-skills to children. Islamic schooling was the first formal education in many parts of Africa and has much older roots than Western education in African societies. 8 When European governments laid claims to territory in Africa during the nineteenth century, they sent explorers and settlers, complemented with missionaries who introduced the Western style of education. Most missionaries viewed an education mirrored on the European model as a mechanism vital to spreading God’s word. The needs of indigenous societies remained of little consequence as a reason for providing an education in sub-Saharan Africa. Colonial administrators supported the educational work of missionaries because they saw the need for skilled labor and trained household help. Historical research in Mali shows that rural children were seldom considered for education policies, except as experimental or marginal concerns. Under the French colonial flag, different types of educational curricula were provided for children in urban and rural areas. Those curricula that existed in urban and coastal areas were superior in terms of the rigor and availability of instruction. The colonial government wanted to educate at least some indigenous people for low-level positions in the administration or trading companies. Colonial governments used the idea of “ruralizing” schools with the intent of keeping rural youngsters in rural areas. Thus, schooling in rural areas had the intent “to maintain differences and inequalities between the rural and urban spheres.” 9 These educational policies effectively reinforced the marginalization of rural areas. There was little effort to change the opportunities available to rural families and their children, or to reduce the economic or social inequalities that prevailed between rural and urban areas.10 This template for colonial education in Mali was similarly applied to other French colonial holdings in Africa, and resulted in similar paths of rural-urban disparities for the subsequent nation-states in western and central Africa. Other European colonial powers chose similar paths.11 With the independence of many governments about 1960, it became evident that the educational systems inherited by the African nations were insufficient and African governments began to expand different educational curricula, from the primary school through university levels. Most African governments stated that they wanted universal primary education in twenty years, yet there is still much to be done toward meeting this

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objective even forty years later. Since independence, African governments have established many rural schools with varying success, but they are generally not available in every village and their quality of instruction pales in comparison to the education available to urban children. During the 1980s, mounting debt and the subsequent structural adjustment policies imposed by the international lending community forced many African governments to curb spending on formal education even further. Since independence, promises and some discussion have been offered to rural areas, but little progress in the way of real educational opportunities has made it on the rural scene. In Mali, rural parents increasingly have become mobilized by the hope of offering better educational opportunities to their children. They have organized their own schools and have adopted their own curricula that aim to be on par with the education offered in urban areas. Rural parents want courses offered in French and a national system of certificates that validates the knowledge offered in formal schooling. 12 Rural parents, who have organized their own schools as a form of protest over the lack and inadequacy of education offered by the state, are found to send their children regularly to the schools they organize. They see value in the curriculum, and the school calendar corresponds with their rural productive and farming activities. These new, rural Malian schools demonstrate that families support regular attendance at school if it does not disturb the economically productive aspects of the household. Overall, though, formal schooling in Mali is still geared toward the urban populations and employment, and rural children do not have the same rights to education as school-age children in the towns and cities. Children’s increased participation in the labor market and decreased school enrollment are both consequences of this rural-urban divide. The disjointed nature of education in rural as compared to urban areas prevailed into the early 1990s in South Africa. In the rural areas, children of colored and black farm workers attended farm schools, while rural white children attended higher-quality boarding schools in urban areas. In apartheid era South Africa, these inequalities patterned by race and urban-rural facilities sustained and enhanced disparities in social and economic status. During the 1980s, African farm schools accounted for 75 percent of all Department of Education and Training schooling, and instructed over two-thirds of all registered pupils. These farm schools made no provision for education beyond an elementary standard five, and a 1983 study revealed that roughly one-half of children dropped out of the farm schools before attaining this minimal level. 13 Again, a colonial context of unequal learning opportunities in urban and rural areas provided the context for the unequal development in rural and urban areas.

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Children’s Work, Primary School Enrollment, and Adult Literacy The relationship between children’s work and primary education is puzzling because some children are able to combine both education and work successfully, while others are not. Research from Togo contends that a decrease in school attendance affects rural areas in particular and that decreased rates of school attendance are both cause and effect of the premature employment of rural children in household labor tasks.14 In contrast, research from Kenya drawing on both rural and urban families finds no relation between children’s unpaid household labor and formal schooling attendance.15 Both of these studies suggest the need to consider the unequal access to quality schooling in both rural and urban areas when studying the relationship between school attendance and child labor. Some children may work to finance the costs of their education and the education of younger siblings. In these cases, work is a prerequisite to children’s educational pursuits and to the education of younger siblings. Data in Table 5.1 show the rate of children’s work participation, the primary school enrollment ratio, and the adult literacy rate for eighteen African countries. Figures 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 clarify the relationships among these measures using scatterplots and regression lines.

Table 5.1

Children’s Work, School Enrollment, and Adult Literacy, 2001

African Country Botswana Zambia Namibia Côte d’Ivoire Lesotho Mauritania Togo Benin Senegal Guinea Gambia Madagascar Chad Tanzania Ethiopia Eritrea Niger Burkina Faso

Percentage of Working Children

Primary School Enrollment Ratio

Literacy Rate

15 16 18 19 21 22 27 27 28 32 34 34 37 37 39 39 44 45

81 75 91 55 70 57 81 63 60 42 65 61 46 48 32 30 25 31

70 78 38 49 83 47 52 38 33 36 48 80 48 68 36 25 14 19

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001). Note: Countries selected based on availability of data.

104 Figure 5.1

Children in Labor Force by Primary School Enrollment Ratio, 2001

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001). Notes: Child labor data not available for Mali. Primary school enrollment data are not available for Malawi, Angola, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Sudan, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. y = –0.41x + 52.91. R2 = 0.696.

Figure 5.2

Adult Literacy Rate by Primary School Enrollment Ratio, 2001

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001). Notes: Child labor data not available for Mali. Primary school enrollment data are not available for Malawi, Angola, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Sudan, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. y = 0.56x + 29.75. R2 = 0.353

Work and School Figure 5.3

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Children in Labor Force by Adult Literacy Rate, 2001

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators 2001 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2001). Notes: Child labor data not available for Mali. Primary school enrollment data are not available for Malawi, Angola, South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Sudan, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. y = –0.26x + 41.95. R2 = 0.309.

The rate of child labor by country generally declines with increases in primary school enrollment, although the relationship is not parallel for all African countries considered. Using data points from Table 5.1, Figure 5.1 shows that the percentage of children working correlates negatively with the primary school enrollment ratio, or the proportion of age-appropriate children attending primary school. While the primary school enrollment ratio is a flawed measure for some countries because children enroll in primary school so that they can “sit for” or take the exam for the primary school certificate a second or third time even though they may not be attending class, this is the best measure available. The resulting graph demonstrates that the percentage of children who work decreases as the primary school enrollment rate increases. Children who work may find it more difficult to attend school, because work and schooling are generally scheduled during the same daylight hours. Children who work may substitute school with work activities, either because their parents value work as education over formal schooling, or because no school facilities are available or their parents cannot afford to pay school fees, which again leaves work as the likely alternative. But what drives work participation and primary school enrollment? Previous research on schooling in Ghana found that when fathers have more education, their children are less likely to work. A father’s educational attainment was found to have a significant negative effect on child labor, and this effect was even stronger for girls than for boys.16 Because educa-

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tion data are not available for fathers for most African countries, the adult literacy rate is used as a proxy to examine the effect of parental education on children’s work and school participation. Figures 5.2 and 5.3 show that adult literacy shares a positive relationship with primary school enrollment and a negative relationship with the proportion of children who work. Figure 5.2 illustrates a relationship between countries with higher rates of adult literacy and higher rates of primary school enrollment. One explanation for this trend is that literate parents generally earn higher incomes and their children have access to more educational opportunities. Figure 5.3 plots the percentage of children who work by the adult literacy rate and confirms that the negative relationship already established using data from Ghana exists across most sub-Saharan African countries.17 Higher adult literacy is associated with a lower percentage of children who work. While these graphs show the relationships among the three measures of children’s work participation, adult literacy, and primary school enrollment, poverty again continues to drive all three factors. As discussed in Chapter 3 (see Figure 3.1), as income increases, child labor decreases. In general, lower incomes accompany lower adult literacy rates, lower primary school enrollment rates, and higher rates of children working. And as long as these lower incomes continue to be patterned by region and rural-urban residence within countries, the issues of child labor and child schooling cannot be fully addressed.

Schooling: The Value of Education The value that parents place on schooling often varies by household type, and household types take distinct forms across rural and urban areas, which are further patterned by socioeconomic status and by culture within rural and urban contexts. Additionally, the value that parents place on schooling often reflects quality issues—such as teacher apathy, absences, and shortages, the overcrowding of classrooms, a lack of books and learning materials, and an inadequate curriculum—that consequently can result in low expectations of the value added by education and low expected private returns of a child’s education.18 Conversely, the value that parents place on schooling is higher when they believe that schools add educational value and when they believe that there are private returns for their children in terms of future income, employment, and social advancement. A study from Burkina Faso found that families use varied strategies to secure education for their children.19 While school is of little or no interest in rural areas, more than 80 percent of children attend school in urban areas near the capital city, Ouagadougou. Burkinabè parents reported not sending their children to school because they did not value formal schooling,

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because of financial difficulty, and because of a lack of room in school for the child. This urban-rural difference stands out as patterning whether parents value and can afford formal schooling, as well as whether there are adequate seats for children in public formal schooling. This space issue is generally accompanied by the overcrowding of classrooms and compromised quality of education, which then influence the value that parents place on schooling and whether it fits into their budgets. In Burkina Faso it was also found that the families who sent children to school regularly differed from those of school dropouts in terms of social stature, employment status, and the overall size of the household. These differences in household type are also patterned by rural-urban factors. Rural children generally have parents with lower social stature, lower income and employment levels, and more children per household compared with parents of urban children. Among rural children, those who have parents with higher social and economic status and fewer children are more likely to attend and value formal schooling.20 In Ghana, the private and social benefits of education are larger for primary than for secondary or higher schooling. The rate of return to education increases with more schooling and greater work experience. Each additional year of schooling offers from 4 to 6 percent in private returns to the student. In this way, formal education can further affect whether a child will stay in school and what type of job a child will take. The longer a child stays in school, the more likely she or he will work for wages in the formal sector economy. Children who leave school during primary school are likely to enter lower-status positions, and are most likely to find a job in the seemingly ever-expandable informal sector economy. Data on child market workers in Senegal demonstrate that there is a significant relationship between the type of work a child does and whether that child has received some formal schooling.21 Apprentices are more likely to have had formal education than sellers and religious beggars. Child apprentices are nearly twice as likely as sellers to have had some formal education, and religious beggars are the least likely to have had formal education. The value that parents place on education often varies by culture, too. It is common for the primary schooling rates of children to differ across ethnic groups in a particular country. For example, national statistics show that Dioula and Mandinka children are better educated than other ethnic groups in Senegal.22 Other national-level data on children who work in open-air markets show disparities across the four major ethnic groups in Senegal in primary school attendance and attainment. In 1997, children from the Dioula ethnic group had the highest rate of attended for the last year of primary school, 27 percent, whereas just 22 percent of Wolof, 20 percent of Poular, and 19 percent of Sereer children had attended the last year.23 It is likely that this cultural difference by ethnic group is enmeshed

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in economics. The Dioula reside predominantly in the south of the country, which is relatively more affluent than other rural regions due to its verdant land and tourism trade. The local cash economy, especially the tourism element, reinforces the value of formal schooling as a form of education. Children who learn to speak and write French are more likely to participate in the tourism trade. The savanna region of Côte d’Ivoire has the lowest level of educational infrastructure and the highest levels of child labor compared with the rest of the country. Distance from a school is a predictor of dropout rates and increased child labor in Côte d’Ivoire. If the school is farther from the village, then fewer children will attend and higher child labor rates are evident. A primary school located in the village is a more obvious alternative than one that is one to five kilometers away. Households with low parental education and lower employment status are more likely to value work over formal schooling to train their children.24 In many rural areas, though, the educational system does not offer convincing returns to children and their families. In these cases, the educational system serves as a push factor that directs children into the labor market, because their parents do not perceive formal school as adequate preparation for the future.

The Failure of Public Schools Many children fail in the public school system in both rural and urban areas. The backdrop to this failure is a fragile state that provides universal but fundamentally underfunded and substandard educational instruction to children. One man explains how he sent his son to the neighborhood public school in Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, for two years, but still the boy could not read French. He complained, “Now, I have to save enough to enroll him in private French school next year . . . and I don’t know if I can do that.”25 This parent does not view the public education system as providing viable opportunities for his son, and private school is not an easily affordable option. In this way, his lack of confidence in public education combined with the high cost of private schooling constrain educational opportunities for his son. Many urban parents lose confidence in the poorly funded public schools and choose private ones. These parents do not view the public school system as creating future opportunities for their children. One Senegalese woman explains, “Kids go to French school for 20 years, finish university, and find no work. My kids learn Arab and English in a private school in Pekine.”26 She believes that the private Arab and English training will better prepare her children than the public French-style schooling system. She has not abandoned education altogether, just the formal education

Work and School

Case in Point 5.1 Kenya The value of education vis-à-vis children’s work in tourism

Kenya provides a good example of what is happening in many parts of Africa due to the severe recession of the 1980s and the resulting debt crisis and structural adjustment programs. Economic growth slowed to almost zero in the early 1990s. Inflation also increased to more than 40 percent, resulting in severe hardships for many citizens, of whom many are children. Since the 1980s, children in tourism have increasingly worked in Kenya, where they work as domestic helpers, market sellers, beggars, parking boys, laborers, and even prostitutes. A study of child labor in Kenyan tourism shows that the average age of a worker is twelve, and that boys outnumber girls by a margin of two to one.27 Children under age fifteen compose 42 percent of the Kenyan population.28 As one child explained, work in tourism and school can be complementary: “Whenever I do not have books, uniform, or money for school fees, my teachers send me home. So sometimes, I go to the beach and fish in order to get some money. If I am unable to pay my school fees, then I go fishing to earn some money so I can pay for the fees.”29 Of the children studied in the tourism industry, 75 percent said they would like to have more formal schooling. One boy offered, “I will never leave school despite the stress. I want more education in order to get a good job and to be able to help my parents in the future.” continues

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Case in Point 5.1 continued Even children who have dropped out of formal schooling altogether would value formal schooling. One boy explained that he would rather attend school than work: “I have also worked periodically in tourism in order to get money to go to school, but ended up not completing school. Now I feel it is better to try and go back to school, because there is no hope for prosperity, as a child, in tourism.” Another boy valued the skills he gained from formal schooling even though he had dropped out: “I am a boy of 15 years and I am running a kiosk along the seafront. I left school because my parents could not afford to pay school fees. Now I am running my own kiosk, and am at least able to read daily.” Parents’ perspectives on work and schooling tend to be more mixed. One mother thought her child’s work in tourism could provide moral education while helping the family: “Children are educated in order to get a job and be able to support their family. If a job is available, why not go for the money. Children should be employed to help the family.” Another parent countered this assessment with the financial reasoning for children’s work: “As a parent I have to send every child to school so that they get a reasonable job. I am a parent and have no income to help. . . . I have to take my child to school, but it is hard to get food for them. . . . Do you think there is a boy who can go to school without books, tuition, money, or food to eat? I did not tell my children to go and work as tourist guides, but they saw the problems we are facing.” These voices from Kenya provide a few insights. First, children’s work in tourism is often a necessity in poor households, and generally both parents and children recognize this. Some children are able to attend school full-time because they may also earn money from tourism to buy supplies and pay fees. Second, many children value formal schooling but have been forced to leave due to their full-time work in tourism. Finally, poverty and culture provide the lens by which parents may value education but must send their children to work rather than to school.

offered by the state. In this context, seeking Arab-English education for children is not uncommon. A growing minority of parents believes that education in languages like Arabic and English offers a greater number of opportunities than schooling in French, the official language of Senegal.

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For families who value the French training, private Islamic-French schools are also popular. In short, parents are choosing private over public schooling and religious over or combined with secular schooling opportunities for their children. This rejection of poorly funded public schools is also a rural phenomenon. The case of rural Malian parents discussed earlier in this chapter illustrates this in a proactive sense. These parents have rejected the poorly funded and subpar schooling offered by the government and pulled together as communities to offer better educational opportunities to their children. They often try to offer curricula on the same level as the schooling offered in urban areas, by offering instruction in French and requiring students to pass a comprehensive exam over academic material. While the government does not offer the same education to rural and urban parents, these parents are seeking the highest level of instruction for their children. Parents with fewer economic resources in both rural and urban settings arrange for more applied types of education to prepare their children when they fail in school or when schools fail to provide a satisfactory education for them. Not all parents and households value formal schooling as an investment. Children’s parents often regard the work of their children, especially those children who are undertaking apprenticeships, as an education. Omar trains in his father’s woodworking shop. He has studied the Koran for two years on a part-time basis in the neighborhood Koranic school, but has never attended public school taught in French. Omar is the youngest of five children. His two older brothers entered metalworking apprenticeships and his two older sisters work with his mother, cleaning and cooking in the compound. None of the children has attended French public school.30 The children in this household are being trained to replace their parents in their sex-specific work. The boys will grow up to be skilled market craftsmen while the girls learn skills they will need to be suitable wives and mothers. In this example, parental perceptions about what type of education is sufficient determine what is offered to children. None of these children are being offered formal education in a public school setting, even though a school is located nearby. In this case, the father values the apprenticeship as a training opportunity more than he values the formal educational opportunities available at the local public primary school. Why is it that some children fail in public schools and that public schools fail some children? In urban areas, the skills taught in public school are the skills valued in the urban economy. It tends to be a story of poor funding on many levels, from buildings to benches, from books to supplies,

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and from failing to pay teachers on time to failing to pay teachers at all. Parents who can afford to place their children in private schools that they perceive as offering higher-quality instruction do so. Generally, these parents reside in urban areas. In rural areas, parents and children are faced with even less public funding for schools and often a different curriculum than that offered in urban areas. The alternatives to formal schooling in rural areas are highly constrained compared with urban areas. In lieu of private schooling alternatives, parents often arrange for their children to work, calling into question the relevancy of education in the rural setting.

Relevancy of Education in the Rural Milieu Formal education or schooling is often viewed as the key to rural transformation and economic development. Many development experts continue to believe and advocate that education will trigger development.31 This idea is grounded in the human capital theory of development, and holds both that education improves the individual choices available to people and that an educated population provides the type of labor force necessary for industrial development and economic growth.32 This idea, introduced in the main address at the 1960 annual meeting of the American Economics Association, may very well hold for industrial development. Rural development, however, may need to forge its own path. While the human capital model has been applied from 1960 to the present, rural areas have become poorer. Education in rural areas seems to have done more for rural-urban migration than for rural development. Data from Malawi demonstrate that those who attain a primary school certificate in rural areas often leave for urban areas, where they aspire to find a wage job and enjoy modern life. Most people who live in rural areas have either not completed or never attended primary school. Given such findings, some educational scholars are now beginning to question whether or not rural development is possible. 33 If urban areas serve as a brain drain for the rural ones, then it becomes difficult for the added human capital gains of education to be used in the rural milieu. Generally, children in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa do not enjoy the same educational opportunities as school-age children in towns and cities. Longitudinal research from Togo contends that withdrawing children from school in rural areas further widens the gap between the urban and rural children, because urban children already enjoy higher state and family investments in their education compared with rural children. Clearly, the unequal development paths between rural and urban areas extend to education inputs for children. At the same time, parents are organizing to provide educational oppor-

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tunities for their children. Community schools in Mali, spontaneous schools in Chad, and clandestine schools of Togo are all organized by families to make up for the state’s lack of interest in rural communities and have the same hopes of forcing the state to recognize the existence of schooling and take responsibility for it.34 These rural schools use the curriculum template of urban schools, use the official rather than a regional language of the country, and train students to sit for a national exam, but adjust the school day and often the school calendar to accommodate the planting and harvesting needs that exist for rural households.35 This allows children to pursue their schooling while also remaining economically productive for the subsistence farm household. These new rural schools in Mali show that families not only tolerate regular school attendance but also encourage it if they value the instruction being offered.

Work Options: Dropping Out or Combining Work and School School Dropouts School attendance began to fall in several sub-Saharan African countries such as Tanzania and Kenya in the 1980s. The rural areas felt this decline in school enrollment more heavily, because government policies increased the gap between urban and rural environments.36 In the 1990s, policies vacillated between the right to education for all and the desire to adapt school to the situation. Children who drop out of school in rural Tanzania return to a traditional path of education and socialization. Formal schooling holds a weak position among the Massai, an ethnic group who traditionally have survived through herding.37 Massai children who attend school have very different lives than those children who have dropped out. In Massai culture, there is a saying that formal schooling is poor training if one wants to become an excellent shepherd. Those children who continue on to secondary school are not allowed to continue concurrently with the informal education offered among the Massai. If a child fails or drops out of secondary school, he is welcomed back into the family by age thirteen. While some children attend secondary school in an urban area, others continue with their traditional education, which includes warrior and hunting skills, in the rural area. For the latter children, their primary school education has not opened any doors to advancement. They still prepare to become herders much like their parents’ generation, but with less land on which to graze animals. The ethnic group as a whole is faced with reduced land to use. It is just a few children who continue with secondary schooling and perhaps postsec-

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ondary schooling, if it provides new opportunities for them. Most of these opportunities, however, require children to live in urban areas and leave their rural lives and customs. In this way, schooling has increased ruralurban migration and consequently threatens the solidarity of rural communities. Much like the Massai in rural Tanzania, work is a substitute for formal schooling among children who work in “handshops” or vending in Dar es Salaam, the country’s capital city.38 These children are generally ruralurban migrants with few economic resources who work as unlicensed mobile hawkers on the streets. One twelve-year-old boy, Safiri, has a sick mother and a father who begs to get by. Safiri sells hardboiled eggs for the equivalent of just over thirty cents a day, which is typical of a handshop vendor.39 He works and lives with his boss in the old quarter of the city. Safiri is learning skills that will prepare him for adult vending work. Other boys who work in mobile vending report that they hope to use their earnings to return to formal education and perhaps try again to obtain their primary school certificate. The more they work, though, the further they fall behind.

Combining Work and School Combining work and formal schooling generally creates conflict unless the two can be complementarily scheduled, such as seen in the new rural schools in Mali or in the more benevolent “earn and learn” schools of Zimbabwe.40 Among working children in Ghana, two-thirds combine their work with school.41 Likewise, most children in Côte d’Ivoire perform some kind of work on a part-time basis. In rural areas, more than 80 percent of children work, and yet a third of these children manage to combine work with schooling.42 This does not indicate an absence of conflict. Data from Côte d’Ivoire have established a negative relationship between the propensity of children to work and the propensity of children to attend primary school.43 Among Ethiopian children surveyed about their preferences of work, school, or a combination of work and school, 29 percent preferred work only, 69 percent preferred to combine work and school, and 2 percent preferred school only. These preferences indicate a telling story that is likely applicable in many African countries: schooling may be desirable but work is often a necessity.44 Rather than stripping children and their families of income potential, it may be more promising in the sub-Saharan African context to coordinate work with education. In many cases the income that children earn makes the marginal difference in determining whether or not they can afford to attend school. Among the poor residing in rural areas and in the shantytowns along the outskirts of large cities, children can improve

Work and School

Case in Point 5.2 Senegal The failure of public schools

The public education system in Senegal is derived from the French system, wherein there are six levels of primary school. The main language of instruction is French. Today, about one-third of adults in Senegal are literate (see Table 5.1 for literacy rates of selected countries in Africa). Thirty-one percent of children ages six to fifteen are enrolled in formal, French-style schools. However, schools are unevenly distributed throughout the country. Children in urban areas have better educational options than children in rural areas, and therefore attend school at higher rates. Over seven in ten children in the predominantly urban Dakar and Ziguinchor regions are enrolled in school, whereas enrollment rates are much lower, less than 25 percent, in more rural regions like Tambacounda and Diourbel.45 The sixth year of primary school is especially critical in the advancement of children, because they generally take two exams at this stage, one to determine whether they will receive the primary school certificate and a second to merit placement in a secondary school. These exams are extremely competitive. In the 1995–1996 school year, just 40 percent of all eligible private and public school students passed their primary school certificate exam. Earning a seat in a secondary school is even more competitive. During the same test cycle, just 22 percent of the children passed the secondary school placement exam.46 continues

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Case in Point 5.2 continued While students who do well are likely to obtain the primary school certificate, only the very best are likely to earn a place in secondary school. This pass rate for the secondary school placement exam reached its high in 1980, when 29 percent of those who took the exam passed. The worsening economy and divided attention to education and social services since 1980 have led to a decreasing pass rate over time. In 1990 it slid to 25 percent, and then fell again between 1990 and 1995 to 22 percent.47 That parents want children to continue in school is evidenced by children’s willingness to take and often retake the exams. The system fails most children, however, at the primary school certificate or the secondary school entrance exam level. Some children attend the last level of primary school three or even four times before reaching the age limit of fifteen, thus swelling already crowded classrooms and increasing competition.48 A main reason that children quit school in Senegal is the high cost of education. Public schools don’t charge tuition, but the student’s family must furnish books, paper, and pencils for the school year at an estimated annual cost of about 10,000 CFA francs (U.S.$20). This sum can be sizable, considering that Senegalese women have an average of five children and a per capita income of U.S.$500.49 Children therefore often share books with a sibling, cousin, or even neighbor, which further hampers the educational process. Due to the failure rates of children in public schools, many parents do not believe that their children can obtain an adequate education in this setting. In rural areas, the children who fail are faced with few or no alternative opportunities other than working. Urban parents, even those of extremely modest means, might pay for a private secular or private religious education if their children fail. Other urban parents allow their children to drop out of formal schooling and seek apprenticeships and market vending work as alternative forms of training. In 1997, about one-fourth of boys working in market apprenticeships had left primary school at the last level, without having obtained the primary school certificate. Fifty-five percent of children working full-time in apprenticeships and market vending had attended primary school.50 Most of these children quit school at the sixth or primary exam year, generally at age eleven or twelve. This dropout pattern is typical for children in both rural and urban areas of Senegal.51 The school dropout rate therefore can feed into the child labor rate in both settings.

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their life chances through combining work and school. 52 If developing country governments are unable or unwilling to provide a passable education to the working poor in rural and urban peripheral areas, children may work to augment the deficiency. This work/school combination often provides a means for progression and advancement for those who are marginalized, neglected, and often forgotten by the national government. Data from Ghana demonstrate an incompatible relationship between work and school. Combining the two has been found to have a substantial negative effect on the learning achievement of children in mathematics and reading. This effect is more pronounced for girls than for boys, and more pronounced for those children who work outside the family home. Research using the Ghana Living Standards Survey found that it is not merely lack of school attendance but also work that has a direct negative effect on children’s school achievement, because working children are exhausted or their interest may be diverted from academic pursuits. Girls and boys typically perform different work, but it appears that girls’ work conflicts more with school achievement than boys’ work. In the Ghana study, girls earned lower scores than boys on all of the achievement tests.53 That the effect is not substantiated for household work provides a useful distinction. Children who labor alongside their parents in household enterprises are much more likely to successfully combine their work and schooling activities. This is good news for child workers, because more than half of Ghana’s child laborers are employed in agriculture alongside their parents.54 Research on children in Cameroon indicates a conflicting relationship between children’s schooling and children’s work. Because children are needed to take care of younger siblings, they are forced to meet their school demands while continuing to complete their traditional work and childcare responsibilities. Some older children are withdrawn from school in order to care for younger siblings and then may return when their siblings reach school age. In addition, “Some elementary school pupils bring their younger siblings to school, while busy parents . . . sometimes encourage their toddlers to sneak into classrooms in their neighborhoods in order to have the watchful attention of teachers and peers.”55 Parents believe that children’s primary duty is to assist in daily household work, but children are expected to take on formal schooling responsibilities. Much like what was found in India for Poomkara youth,56 children are expected to meet additional educational expectations while maintaining their traditional workloads. Because schooling is allowed as an additional task or responsibility, it has been argued to be “another type of work for children.”57 A different perspective on combining work and school is offered by the

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“earn and learn” schools found on many coffee and tea estates in Zimbabwe.58 In this system, students generally earn their school fees and extra spending money by completing a full day’s work on a tea or coffee estate, and then follow a full academic schedule. One detailed study of children in various types of employment in Zimbabwe finds that their employment in commercial agriculture is actually quite vital in terms of opportunities and livelihood.59 Work often provides extra options for children who have limited resources. One boy, commenting on his “earn and learn” boarding school option, says, “I found the situation suffocating [and] nearly returned home but the bus fare was not enough for the back route.” He then became accustomed to the workload and decided to stay for the education and the social life. “Just after the first salary, I was very surprised to have paid school fees and left with a pocket money.”60 At the Christmas holiday break, he visited his parents and helped them buy animals for their herd with his extra spending money. This boy provides much-needed income to his parents’ household budget while also obtaining a formal education. The successful cases of combining work and school are typically neither newsworthy nor considered to be a social problem. Rather, studies pointing to the maltreatment of children in commercial agriculture catch society’s attention. 61 The “earn and learn” schools take two distinct forms: those where children work on the same estate as their parents, and those where children live in a boarding situation away from their families. The potential for abuse or exploitation is much greater in the boarding schools. Work in commercial agriculture on coffee and tea estates is often difficult, but many children find that they can do the work and benefit from the education offered, which is generally better than the public state schools and on par with schools in urban areas. Because of the perceived educational benefit, children apply competitively to attend these schools. While many child workers are able to combine work and school in Zimbabwe, some children are not. The dropout rate for one boarding “earn and learn” school, 10–20 percent for a normal school year (not including those who leave during the first few weeks), provides support for this claim. For children who drop out of the local public secondary school (9 percent for half the school year), mostly because they lack the necessary funds, the boarding school provides an alternative. Poverty is the main reason that children stated for attending the boarding school, followed by not having enough to eat at home and the death of the family breadwinner. 62 There may be costs to educational achievement, as was found in the Ghanaian context, but perhaps it is better to offer attractive alternatives for working children before dissolving their work option.

Work and School

Case in Point 5.3 Madagascar Combining work and school in the urban milieu

Independent school migrants have become common in a regional city of northern Madagascar in the last few decades. These children migrate from rural areas and then bear the responsibilities of being full-time students and of sustaining themselves independently in the urban milieu. These children have successfully completed their primary school education in rural areas, but must relocate to a regional city in order to access secondary and higher education. Secondary schools are not equipped with dormitories, so these children are required to rent on their own or with a group of classmates. Many of these temporary households consist only of children who are ten to thirteen years old.63 These children come from rural households of modest means. Their parents must do without the child’s household work inputs but also send cash to cover additional costs incurred for rent, food, school supplies, and in some cases tuition. Children who do well in school are those who develop daily urban survival strategies. Most children try to go home on the weekends to assist their parents in the fields and collect food for the week, regardless of their academic calendar of exams and activities. Because parents often do not have cash to buy everyday school supplies such as paper and pens, children develop small businesses to earn pocket money. The more successful vendors are then able to make substantial contributions to their housing costs. continues

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Case in Point 5.3 continued

At 14 years old, Bertrand moved to the urban area to attend school. After three years in town, he shares a room with two other students and attends the state-run high school. Bertrand’s parents are subsistence farmers who live 25 kilometers away, so he is unable to travel home each weekend to help in the fields and bring back food for the week. To help meet his costs, he has operated a small bread business for 18 months with his roommate. They buy loaves of French bread at a city bakery and then sell them to their neighbors each morning for a small profit. When they expanded and opened a small bread stall in a daily market, the boys were able to cover their house rent of 10,000 francs per month, and to contribute to the cost of one boy’s school fees. Sometimes, there is pocket money left to attend movies. The boys were relieved that they could help their parents with the financial burden of the schooling.64 These children, temporarily placed in the urban area and still needed in the rural one, straddle two contexts. Some do quite well in the urban area and became predominantly independent. Others continue to visit their families on the weekends. While there are variations in how well these children do financially and academically, many successfully continue their studies because of their willingness and ability to combine work and formal secondary and postsecondary schooling.

Conclusion: Work, School, and Culture This chapter has examined the history, costs, and relevancy of formal schooling in sub-Saharan Africa, and children’s ability or inability to combine their schooling with work. Many parents prefer to engage their children in work rather than public formal education in order to prepare them for the future.65 Research from Senegal and Tanzania lends support to this assertion, especially among the child workers who have never attended formal school. Parents may prefer applied work training because it is more applicable in career work or because they are unable financially to invest years of formal education in their children.

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There are also cultural differences, especially among those who never started formal education, that differentiate children who attend school from those who work. In some cases, parents do not even entertain formal schooling as an option for their children because they themselves never attended school. In other cases, formal schooling is not necessarily valued as a way to prepare children for adult careers. A father can teach his son the needed skills for woodworking or market selling, and a mother can teach her daughter household tasks. Even among parents who value formal schooling, not all continue to value public schooling. Some children fail in public schools, and many public schools fail to educate children, which in turn affects how school is valued. Many parents do not see the current public, secular educational system as providing adequate preparation for their children. Instead, parents are investing in private, religious forms of education like Anglo-Arab or Franco-Arab schools. Work in an apprenticeship is also viewed as a viable substitute for school among dropouts and those who fail to earn a place in secondary school. Parents in sub-Saharan Africa prepare their children for adult life in an environment of expensive private schooling and inadequate public schooling. A substantial number of children are able to complete both work and school, although success at both is not always achieved. In some cases, such as for children whose work involves household tasks, no relationship is found between school and work. In other cases, working children show poorer marks in school. Overall, though, when parents choose work over formal schooling for their children, they generally have a good reason, such as the inadequacy of public education, the inability to afford it, or the presence of the “earn and learn” system as an option.

Notes 1. Myers, “Lemons into Lemonade?” p. 85. 2. Kuan-tsu, Chinese philosopher, quoted from Miner and Rawson, The New International Dictionary of Quotations. 3. Coulombe and Canagarajah, Child Labor and Schooling in Ghana. This research parallels Claudia Buchmann’s finding, in “Family Structure,” on the lack of relationship between school attendance and child labor force participation. In both studies, the girls are participating in domestic work. 4. Vener and Blunch, Revisiting the Link. 5. Saji and Canagarajah, Ghana’s Labor Market. 6. Vener and Blunch, Revisiting the Link. 7. Ibid. 8. Nwomonah, Education and Development in Africa. 9. Diarra and Lange, “Paradoxical Relationship.” 10. Lange, L’ecole au Togo.

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11. One might hypothesize that the case would be different for some of the British holdings in Africa, as some were earmarked for direct rule (government through European settlers in places such as Kenya or Zambia) whereas others were earmarked for indirect rule (government through local elites in places such as Nigeria or Ghana). In both types of British rule, the outcome was the same template of unequal educational opportunities for Africans between rural and urban areas; urban coastal areas were considered to be more important than the interior. 12. Diarra and Lange, “Paradoxical Relationship.” 13. Nasson, “Perspectives on Education,” pp. 93–114. 14. Lange, “The Demand for Labour.” 15. Buchmann, “Family Structure.” 16. Coulombe and Canagarajah, Child Labor and Schooling in Ghana. 17. Ibid. 18. Fallon and Tzannatos, Child Labor, p. 4. 19. Yaro, “Les strategies scolaires.” 20. Ibid. 21. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 22. Ndiaye, Diouf, and Ayad, Enquête démographique et de santé. 23. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 24. Grootaert, Child Labor in Côte d’Ivoire. 25. Bass, Working for Peanuts, p. 81. 26. Ibid., p. 80. 27. International Labour Organization (ILO), Child Labour in Tourism. 28. World Atlas, Geography IQ. 29. Quotations from ILO, Child Labour in Tourism, pp. 12–15. 30. Adapted from Bass, “Beyond Homework.” 31. Nwomonoh, Education and Development in Africa. 32. Fägerlind and Saha, Education and National Development, p. 18. 33. Msiska, “Some Practical Limits of Curriculum,” p. 291. 34. Diarra and Lange, “Paradoxical Relationship.” 35. Ibid. 36. Lange, “The Demand for Labour.” 37. Bonini, “Parcourse scholaires,” pp. 577–594. 38. May, “Handshops and Hope.” 39. Ibid., pp. 29–30. 40. Diarra and Lange, “Paradoxical Relationship”; Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 41. Coulombe and Canagarajah, Child Labor and Schooling in Ghana. 42. Grootaert, Child Labor in Côte d’Ivoire. 43. Grootaert and Kanbur, “Confronting Child Labour.” 44. Woodhead, “The Value of Work and School,” p. 206. 45. Republic of Senegal, Situation économique. 46. Ministry of Education statistics for 1995–1996 first published in Bass, Working for Peanuts, p. 79. Of the 106,693 students who took the primary school certificate exam, just 44,092 passed. Of the 106,640 students who took the entrance exam for secondary school, just 23,847 passed. However, during this same cycle, 25,350 were admitted to secondary schools for the 1996–1997 year, suggesting a small measure of flexibility in this rigid process. 47. Association for the Development of African Education, Education in Africa. 48. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 49. Estimate for 2001, from World Atlas, Geography IQ.

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50. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 51. Republic of Senegal, Dimensions sociales de l’adjustement, p. 19; Sadio, Le travail des enfants. 52. Myers, “Lemons into Lemonade?” 53. Heady, “The Effect of Child Labor on Learning Achievement.” 54. Saji and Canagarajah, Ghana’s Labor Market. 55. Nsamenang, “Early Childhood Care and Education,” p. 446. 56. Nieuwenhuys, “To Read and Not to Eat.” 57. Qvortrup, “Societal Position of Childhood.” 58. Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., pp. 161–162. 61. Sachikonye, Child Labour in Hazardous Employment; Grier, “Invisible Hands.” 62. Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 63. Sharp, “The Work Ideology of Malagasy Children.” 64. Ibid., p. 36. 65. Bonnet, “Le travail des enfants.”

6 The Value of Children’s Work: Getting the Short End of the Stick

Fourteen-year-old Hamisi, who is an orphan, now works in the fishing industry in Mwanza, Tanzania, with his mother’s brother. He came to Mwanza four years ago, and does not attend school. Instead, he works full-time and is paid with room, board, clothing, and medical expenses.1 Societal definitions and expectations structured through children’s status translate into their work being valued for its training value rather than its production or market value.2 Children’s work can differ by region, nation, and locality in sub-Saharan Africa. There is no typical form of children’s work, because children are found in varied positions in both rural and urban areas. And the idea of a monolithic child laborer with a monolithic depreciated value, most readily described by the phrase “[a] poor, exploited, working child,” adds little to our understanding of the issues surrounding child labor.3 It is possible, though, to explore how children’s labor is socially constructed within a particular working environment, and then to expand those findings to include subtleties from a variety of child labor situations across the African continent. This chapter examines the valuation of children’s labor. Ethnographic research, including informal interviews and case studies from urban markets in Senegal, highlight how various organizational factors in the work environment coalesce to create the value of children’s labor. These different factors serve as stratification influences and effectively come to represent a myriad of household survival strategies. Conclusions based on observations from Senegal will be compared with findings from other studies completed across sub-Saharan Africa that support or provide contrasting social patterns, and therefore reveal a greater complexity to the issue of how children’s labor is assigned value.

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Organization of an Urban Market and Children’s Work The Teline market is in the heart of the Medina, the oldest district of Dakar. Over 1,500 vendors sell everything from fruits, cloth, cosmetics, skin brightener, hair straightener, household products, paper products, and dry goods, to dried and fresh fish, vegetables, and prepared meals. Over half of families who work in the market have migrated from rural areas. Work in the market is gendered; men and women sell different types of products, for distinctly different price ranges. Men tend to sell electronics and musical tapes, nonprecious jewelry, ready-made adult clothing, and cloth. Women also sell cloth, but are more prominent as vendors of used children’s clothing, prepared foods, fruits, vegetables, dried fish, soaps, and herbal medicines. This occupational segregation by gender provides the context in which men’s products are more highly valued and profitable than women’s products. Men sell imported goods whereas women sell local products, many of which they have created through their labor—for example, by selling sugar-coated peanuts or coconut cookies. In a market setting where bargaining is the rule, it is much easier to justify the elevated price of a durable good than the labor of women. Much as sociology has documented that the wage gap between men’s and women’s labor in the United States is due to the segregation of their work,4 the occupational segregation by types of product sold in the Senegalese market context provides the rules by which women’s work is heavily devalued in the negotiation process. The layout of the market accentuates how gender structures the placement of vendors. Women and men are located in different areas of the market. The heart of the market is located in a large covered pavilion where most of the vendors, who are men, sell different types of meat and fish, as well as canned goods and jewelry along one edge. Just outside and behind the pavilion, sellers of vegetables (such as hot peppers, hibiscus leaves, or lettuce) and prepared food (such as roasted peanuts, sugar-coated peanuts, or cookies) display their goods under semiprotective, tattered umbrellas. Most of these vegetable and prepared-food sellers are women and children, and most of the children sell products that their mothers have prepared or secured. At the edge of the market are several more established stalls run by men who sell housewares such as pots and pans. They have situated themselves in an area of the market heavily inhabited by women, their main consumers. In this way, they make the most of their location. The carpentry, shoemaking, metalworking, and tailoring shops are found along the streets neighboring the market. These workshops are generally larger than the boutiques in the market and are run by men. Men are more likely than women to be found in established stalls in the more lucrative areas of the market. In general, the market’s periphery houses the least-established sellers,

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mostly women and children. Men are represented in proportionately higher numbers than women on the main road and in the central area of the market. Men’s stalls are larger and more established than women’s stalls. Many women bring their stalls, in the form of overturned buckets, with them to the market every day. When women and men engage in the same type of trade, for example, selling cloth, men’s stalls are more permanent and have larger inventories than women’s stalls.

Using Gender and Women’s Work to Understand Child Labor The stratification by gender in Senegal adds to our understanding of children’s market work. Steeped in a history of African and Islamic patriarchy that offers boys higher status and more opportunity than girls, work and social lives are separated by sex in Senegal. This gender stratification system is supported by Senegalese culture and has been reinforced by Islamic religious teachings.5 There is a relationship between children’s sex and the different types of work available to them, as well as how children are incorporated into market work. Fatou, an eight-year-old girl of the Wolof ethnic group who is a piment, or hot pepper vendor, came into the market through her mother, Fauma, for whom she works. Moreover, she labors in a trade, the buying and selling of hot peppers, that is wholly composed of women. However, Fatou’s two brothers, one older and one younger, both go to school and do not work in the market. Her mother explains, “The boys must go to school now and learn a trade later. They will not have to sell hot peppers for their livelihood.” She hopes that the boys will learn a skilled craft like tailoring or shoemaking. Fauma has a clear idea of what types of work opportunities are available for her boys and girls, and these suitable opportunities differ by gender, with the higher-status occupations requiring greater skills and resulting in higher pay reserved for boys. Three maids, Hadji, age ten, Mariama, age eleven, and Rafine, age ten, from the Sereer ethnic group have all worked in the home setting with a woman named Anta for two years. These girls have also been incorporated into the selling of peanuts in the market. Through Anta’s efforts and planning, the stall and products are prepared daily. Each girl hired as a maid to work in Anta’s home in actuality works both as a maid and as a vendor in the market. The girls come from a village in the Baol region near Diourbel in central Senegal, where each girl’s parents receive 3,000 CFA francs (about U.S.$5.60) per month for their daughter’s work. The employer pays a sum directly to the parents, and the girl receives no direct monetary compensation. The girls are rotated into the domestic work offered by Anta on

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major holidays, when there is considerable traffic between urban and rural areas. This case shows how gender structures the definition of children’s work. The maids are not defined as market traders, but rather, market selling is an extension of their household duties. Their work in the market is defined as the work of their employer, Anta. Market work allows women sellers to enter remunerative activities on a part-time basis. For all women, selling is not an expected extension of their household duties, but a luxury, because they have a great deal of control over these earnings. They may be expected to share with the household—or spruce up the rice and fish with a bigger piece of meat—but their earnings are their own. Further, the selling of peanuts in the market provides an excellent example of how gender and age combine to structure and separate work opportunities available to women and men, and to adults and children. Groundnut production was the main export of Senegal from the time of the French colonial government until the early 1970s.6 The selling of groundnuts is expressly stratified in the market setting; men trade in large quantities of raw peanuts and refined peanut oil, while women sell peanut sauce and children sell small bags of peanuts. Girls dominate the selling of small bags of roasted peanuts, although they generally work for the gain of their mother or a female relative. Boys generally attend school, help their fathers, or enter an apprenticeship. Another case of Sereer girls working in Dakar is exemplified by Diouma Faye, a thirteen-year-old from the Louga region. Like other girls and women, Diouma sells hot coffee in the market. She lives with extendedfamily members who reside in the immediate neighborhood. Although she identifies the woman she works with as her “aunt,” this kinship tie is not even clear to the girl, although this woman does visit her mother and father in the village on major holidays. Her “aunt” manages her money by providing her with the proper increments of expected change and counting the receipts at the end of each day. Consequently, Diouma has no idea how much daily profit she earns, and does not fully understand simple arithmetic. She has never been to school. In the market, she has memorized the typical types of transactions and can only take and give change in these amounts. She is the third child of her mother and father, and her father has three wives. Her mother is the second wife. Her two older siblings work; her sister works as a maid in Louga and her brother helps her father in the fields. Among her four younger siblings, the three girls do housework and the boy studies in primary school. Again, socialization, which is different by sex, explains why she sells a certain product in the market and also how educational opportunities can be structured by gender. Ibou, a twelve-year-old porter from the Peul ethnic group, works in a trade that is entirely composed of boys. Ibou has been working in the market for two years. His father has a boutique of canned and bottled groceries

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in another part of the market, but a family friend looks over Ibou’s work in the center of the market. Although Ibou was born in Dakar, his parents had migrated from Guinea. He is the second child of his father. Unfortunately, his mother died when he was five years old. Ibou’s father has not remarried, and teaches his two older sons, Ibou and Kadiatou, how to sell. Kadiatou sells sacks. The two younger children both attend school; the younger boy, Momadou, attends French-style public school, while the younger girl, Issatou, studies the Quran with a marabout, or Muslim teacher. French school was never entertained as an option for Issatou, because of her lower status as female. However, public school provides the boy the needed education to access the better opportunities in the market as well as in the formal economy. Because of this difference in educational opportunity by gender, Momadou will have more occupational opportunities in jobs that pay better than those available to Issatou. Ibou’s family illustrates the salience of gender in influencing market work, and also the levels of educational opportunity given to children. Momadou, a ten-year-old boy of the Peul ethnic group from Guinea and an apprentice to a tailor, also works in an all-male shop. He came to Senegal in 1994 with his uncle, a meat salesman in the market. Momadou’s parents reside in Conakry, Guinea, and he is the oldest of four children. Momadou’s uncle placed him in the customary ten-year tailoring apprenticeship. Although occasionally there is the rare seamstress, a coudreuse, by and large men do the professional sewing in the market. In this market context there are no girls working as apprentices to tailors. Girls are more likely to learn sewing in a formal trade school than in the market. However, these formal sewing schools are reserved for girls age fourteen or older, and the cost is prohibitive for families who choose to arrange for their children’s market labor rather than send them to primary or secondary school. Within the market, there is very little opportunity for girls to enter the sewing trade due to the gender stratification of occupational roles. Ideas patterned through gender about how girls learn to sew and what level of expertise they will acquire define boys as tailors and girls as seamstresses. Thiam, a twelve-year-old boy of the Wolof ethnic group, is an apprentice to a shoemaker, a cordonnier or dalkat, and also works in an all-male shop. Considering the caste system in Senegal, it might be expected that Thiam would learn the trade of his father, a tailor, but this is not the case. Thiam’s father located the apprenticeship because he has several sons, and they could not all follow him into the tailoring trade. Thiam’s work diversifies the training that children in his family seek to attain. In the workshop where Thiam works, there are eight patrons, or employers, and eight apprentices. Each apprentice is contracted to work with an employer. Each apprentice both takes his meals and sleeps in the workshop. Again, among apprenticeships, occupational segregation by gender determines the jobs

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into which boys are placed. Craft apprenticeships, like those into which Thiam and his brothers have been placed, are predominately male. Cheikh, an eight-year-old boy from the Wolof ethnic group, works as religious student beggar, or talibe, in the market with a small group of boys. Cheikh came to Dakar when he was a few years old because his father, a farmer, died and his mother had no money for food. He has no contact with his mother and the rest of his family, who are still living in the village about three hours east of Dakar. His family entrusted him to a marabout to study the Quran. In exchange for his quranic lessons and housing, Cheikh begs in the market for uncooked rice and sugar, and for money, which he turns over to the religious teacher. The opportunity to become a religious student beggar living with a religious teacher is reserved for boys. Although gender determines the particular jobs children do and whom they work with, there is the occasional special case of a child who works with an adult of the opposite sex. Although no boys were found to be assisting women, the case of Mariama, a ten-year-old girl of the Sereer ethnic group who works with her father, illustrates how work remains separated by sex and therefore unequal, even though she and her father work in the same stall. Mariama works with her father in the boutique, where he sells canned goods, rice, oil, and onions. He sells the typical products sold by men, and she sells the typical products sold by other women and girls in the market—tomatoes and occasionally hot peppers. Their work is defined by gender, because the boutique’s products are separated into products he sells and products she sells, even though the receipts and profits are pooled. Also, Mariama cares for her younger brother while selling her vegetables in the stall. In this way she performs additional, unpaid domestic work, which is consistent with reproductive activities typically considered “female.” Thus the sexual division of reproductive labor in the home interacts with and reinforces the sexual division in market work.7 Another situation, which on the surface appears to contrast with the sex segregation of work, is that of Ibrahima, a thirteen-year-old boy from the Bambara ethnic group who sells in a female-dominated trade. Ibrahima sells dried fish alongside women selling the same product. His father is a wholesale dried-fish vendor on the outskirts of the market. He put Ibrahima in the market so that he could learn the trade and eventually take his father’s place as a supplier to the many women whom he now works alongside. Even though he works alongside these adults, his table is located at the end of their section, and he is not integrated into their social networks and economic savings groups. His male status precludes his being integrated into their networks. However, his male status allows him to work on equal footing with these older women. Girls learn to sell dried fish as well, but as ambulatory sellers who do not have proper stalls like the women and Ibrahima. In time, the girls will replace the women sellers, but will never

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catch up with Ibrahima, because he will eventually replace his father. In this case, both social class and gender offer different opportunities for boys and girls. Each of the cases presented above suggests the relevance of gender as a structuring force in determining what work children do in the Senegalese market. Perhaps it is the mother who brings her daughter to work, or the father who secures work for his son in an appropriate trade or apprenticeship. If the child works for extended family, the child generally works with a same-sex employer who has a significant kin relationship with the child’s parents. It is the structure of the workplace, in particular the sex segregation of the workplace, that leads to the highly stratified nature of children’s market work by type of product sold. This separation of work creates the context in which their work is valued differently. Further, because of the existing labor market structure, wherein men dominate in craft trades, apprenticeships to craft workshops are more open to boys because it is their fathers’ relationships that secure their placement in work. National survey data on child market workers indicate that just 3 percent of apprentices are girls.8 Similarly, because women dominate the position of seller, girls are heavily placed into selling positions. Across African countries, mutually reinforcing links exist between gender socialization and boys’ and girls’ work. These links, in turn, structure their opportunities. For example, girls in Kenya are discouraged from even primary education in some areas due to Islamic religious convictions.9 As a result, girls in these highly Muslim areas are likely to have fewer skills that are pliable in the labor market. Different jobs in the tourist trade in Kenya are predominantly open to boys by a margin of two to one.10 When girls are found working in tourism, their work is generally an extension of domestic and reproductive tasks. The separateness of children’s socialization across African countries sets the stage for boys to begin formal schooling and even continue their education alongside work, while girls often are unable to do either. These limitations in terms of educational opportunities often coincide and in many cases result in limitations in the labor market for girls and then women. Research done in a rural community in southern Tanzania suggests that the routine nature and largely domestic location of girls’ chores limit and shape their later options for work. In the rural community, girls’ work takes place on a daily basis and involves longer hours compared with the work of boys, who tend to have chores that are more seasonal in nature.11 Likewise in Madagascar, only the boys who do well academically at the primary school level are encouraged to migrate from rural to urban areas to continue with secondary education and possibly undertake urban work.12 Even if a girl does well academically, urban migration as a means of continuing her schooling at the secondary level is not an option. Because

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there are no secondary schools located in rural areas, girls have a distinct disadvantage compared with boys in the labor market. In these cases, both local culture and domestic labor demands make it impossible for girls to leave their family households and live independently in urban areas. As was found in research in rural areas of Sudan, these different expectations for boys and girls in Madagascar, whereby girls are expected to do more domestic work on a daily basis than boys, often preclude the possibility of girls attending school.13 Again, there are mutually supporting links between the gender socialization of children and the opportunities that are made available to them.

Ethnicity, Locale, and Kinship as Social Structure Gender is generally not the sole basis for assigning reproductive labor,14 and not all women and girls have the same relationship to it. Ethnicity, locale, and kinship are also important variables in shaping children’s market work. When individuals share the same ethnicity and village, they are likely to share kinship ties as well. In western Africa, individuals of the same village often share rites of passage, like circumcision, and develop kinship ties.15 Thus, individuals have kinship ties based on family name but also based on their age cohort in the village. Research on child market workers in the Senegalese context supports this proposition; the relationships that define which children work, and how, when, and under whom they work, are many times linked to shared ethnicity and village.16 In this way, parents’ social capital is established and maintained through ethnicity and kinship. For parents who do not work in the market, it is generally kinship ties that enable the placement of their children in such work. For example, Fatou and her mother come to the Teline market every day of the week from Gueguwaye with seven other women of the Wolof ethnic group, also from their neighborhood. These eight women form a buying block when they go to purchase the next day’s produce at the big supply market in Thiaroye, the site of another urban market. These women also sit together, creating a lively hot pepper section at the market’s edge. Also drawing on ethnicity and location, Anta, from the Sereer ethnic group, has had three Sereer maids who are all from the same village. Two of the girls are cousins and share the same family name. Anta’s husband’s family came to Dakar in the 1960s from the girls’ village, to which they maintain links. Likewise, Diouma’s hot coffee business is made possible through her Sereer aunt, who was born in the village where Diouma’s parents live. For girls, ties of ethnicity and kinship create the necessary associations that bring children into market work. Ethnicity and locale shape opportunities available to apprentices who

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work in the market. All of the boys and adults who work in Thiam’s shoe shop are from the Wolof ethnic group, and indeed they come from two villages within three miles of Diourbel, a medium-sized city in the interior. In the case of this workshop, the combination of ethnic affiliation and locale seems to intersect at a point that provides this training opportunity for boys. In contrast, in the case of Momadou from Guinea, ethnicity takes prominence over locale in shaping the available work opportunities. Although Momadou did not previously know the group of tailors with whom he works, they are all Guinean, even though some have lived most of their lives in Senegal. Momadou’s uncle formed the relationship that led to his apprenticeship while working in the Teline market in Dakar. For Momadou, ethnic group affiliation is clearly a salient variable shaping market activities and worker-supervisor relationships. It is rare to find a child of the Sereer ethnic group working with a Wolof or Poular supervisor. Market work is not segregated by ethnicity, but kinship ties based on ethnicity and shared social experience are extremely useful for rural families who hope to place their children in urban market work. For the talibe Cheikh, locale and kinship influence his process of incorporation. Cheikh comes from a village in the peanut-growing region, where the Mouride order of Islam prevails. The marabout, who teaches Cheikh, cares for him and oversees his work, has family ties to Cheikh’s village, and is a cousin to the Muslim religious leader in the village. The relationship between the two religious leaders may very well be that they studied the Quran together, or they could indeed be consanguine kin. The village religious leader arranged Cheikh’s student begging situation. Cheikh’s mother did not know the city religious leader with whom Cheikh was ultimately placed. Although Cheikh did not previously know any of the other students with whom he now works, the city religious leader maintains contact with several Muslim religious leaders in villages near his home. In this case, kinship relations, which could be blood-based but are often socially constructed, coalesce with location to construct the process by which children become incorporated into the religious student begging that is often seen in public places. In many cases, where children’s work is merely an extension of their parents’ work, the most immediate ties of kinship shape its possibilities. Mariama’s vegetable selling and Ibrahima’s dried-fish selling, along with Ibou’s portering and his brother’s sack selling, are all ambulatory extensions of their fathers’ market stalls. Their family lineage relationship sets the precondition for their introduction into market work. Although Fatou’s hot pepper selling could also be viewed as an extension of her mother’s work, her mother’s work is qualitatively different from these other cases because it is highly dependent on ethnic and neighborhood affiliation with the other women working as hot pepper sellers.

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In most situations, ethnicity and locale as well as kinship have shaped children’s work opportunities in the market context. It seems that children who enter market work through nonfilial kin are generally at the highest risk of exploitation, or conversely, may be at the lowest risk of exploitation. Children who work as religious student beggars generally hail from rural backgrounds but live and work in locations that are several hours distant from their family villages. There is little oversight, and consequently much room for abuse. Research on religious student beggars in Gambia has found an upset in the balance between begging and studying. In many cases, the more lucrative religious begging often takes precedence over the religious studies.17 Among the religious student beggars of Senegal, the rural location of their households and kinship ties are important to consider along with ethnicity. Boys from the Toucouleur ethnic group are more likely to engage in religious student begging than are boys of Wolof ethnicity. Child workers generally share ethnic affiliation with their supervisors. It is rare to find a child who works with a supervisor of another ethnic group. While market work is not explicitly separated by ethnicity, kinship ties based on ethnicity and shared social experience are extremely useful for rural families who hope to place their children in urban market work. Ethnicity is therefore significantly related to what position a child will take in market work, but it is not clear whether ethnicity is a predictor. Thus, locale and kinship should be considered in tandem with ethnicity. Among the Malagasy children who migrate for school opportunities in a regional city of Madagascar, those who work in the urban milieu build their survival strategies through other children of similar backgrounds. These children share a culture—a rural upbringing—even though they may not come from the same villages. These children are also viewed as nonkin or outsiders by those in the urban area, so they are bonded in their exclusion and therefore cooperate in order to forge similar futures. For these children, locale and then ethnicity and lack of kin-related relations shape the opportunity landscape. The use of kinship in child labor situations can be somewhat gratuitous. Children from Mozambique who work on tea farms just over the border in Zimbabwe often use fictitious kinship terms to refer to their supervisors.18 The idiom of kinship is invoked to provide the pretext of a large subsistence farm household. Migrant children’s work is blended with the work of the farmer’s own children. To the outside eye, it is difficult to distinguish the work of migrant children from that of the farmer’s children, and the farmer is thought to be fostering poor children. The use of kinship in this way can hide the exploitation of children’s labor. Starting at around age nine, children work on these tea farms in exchange for food, clothing, and housing. Sometimes these children do not attend school. Because many of these fostered children work and live away from their parents’ supervi-

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sion, and perhaps illegally in the country, they hold a weak bargaining position vis-à-vis their employer. Overall, ethnicity, locale, and kinship are defining characteristics that organize children’s labor and in turn determine the value of children’s labor. In rural and urban areas, and in different parts of Africa, the importance of each may vary, but they are indeed factors that affect whether children work and what types of work they perform. In this way, parents’ background and social networks impact the opportunities available to their children.

Spatial Relations That Organize and Separate Children’s Work Spatial distance and structural placement are significant factors that divide and therefore define what we call “adults’ work” and “children’s work.” This is especially evident when children work in the same boutique or craft as adults. For example, spatial relations differentiate the work of Fauma, the hot pepper vendor, from that of her daughter, Fatou. Fauma sits on a low stool behind a table with other women selling hot peppers, while Fatou must balance a tray full of hot peppers elevated above her head and push her way through the market against throngs of human bodies. Even though the two sell the same product and Fatou is a mobile extension of her mother’s stall, Fatou’s work is different from that of her mother. Because Fatou is mobile, she does not have an established status among market positions. It is through her mother’s established stall status that she is integrated into the market. Like the work of Fatou and Fauma, Ibrahima Fall’s dried-fish selling is separated from that of his father, Pape Fall, by distance. The placement of Ibrahima in the market with the lower-status women sellers reifies the distinction between Ibrahima’s and his father’s work. Though the stalls are operated separately, all of the receipts go to the father. When Ibrahima’s father was asked why Ibrahima worked in the center of the market, he said, “Ibrahima is not experienced enough to sell elsewhere. He must work with the women who are still learning about selling dried fish.” The father regards and describes the women as still learning, even though many of them have been selling his dried fish in the market for twenty-five years. It is striking that the father did not comment on the greater exposure to customers, which would seem a more obvious reason for the separation of their work. In this case, the work of children and women is considered to be on a lower level than men’s market work. The “different ties are woven between people of the same generation, involving a certain hierarchical organization depending on age and sex.”19 Children’s and women’s purported lack of

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knowledge and experience reflects cultural ideas of power and control in Senegal that elevate men above women, and seniors above juniors. Again it is spatial placement that helps to distinguish children’s and adults’ work in the case of Mariama’s vegetable sales within her father’s boutique. While she sits on the ground, he sits on a chair. Because he sells from an elevated spatial level compared to his daughter, their work appears to be different but in actuality is the same because they share a receipt book. Earlier the case was made that the types of products sold differ by the gender of the seller. In this case, patterns of age inequality and gender inequality coalesce to separate their work. By selling different products in the same boutique, the normative separation of female and male tasks takes on additional meaning because it also delineates and tangibly represents children’s and adults’ work as different. The maids who work for Anta provide another example of how the structure of work activities and distance affect what is defined as either children’s or adults’ work. Anta goes to a larger wholesale market in the evening to buy peanuts for the next day. Anta prepares the peanuts into four roasted types: with salt, with salt and skins, with sugar, and without sugar and salt. Anta then fills small plastic bags with a specific quantity of peanuts to be sold for 25 CFA francs (U.S.5¢) each. Anta counts, prepares, and places the bags on a tray to be taken to the maids’ stall in the market. The girl then carries the peanuts to market, sweeps and prepares the stall area, and begins selling by 10 A . M . Anta visits the stall periodically throughout the day to collect the receipts and check on the business. She also keeps all of the earnings for herself. Their tasks never overlap and the employer maintains a distance from the employees even though they are working in the same business. Because of seniority, Anta plays the role of supervisor while the maids play the worker role. Through distance and task specialization, their work activities are maintained as separate. There is a clear delineation between adults’ work, handling receipts and procuring supplies, and children’s work, selling. Like the maids, Diouma works in a highly specialized environment. She completes precise tasks: sweeping the selling area, constructing a makeshift stall in the form of an overturned bucket, filling cups with coffee and cream, and taking in money. Her aunt prepares the coffee before going to the market, and brings a replacement bucket one hour after Diouma’s arrival at 9 A.M. Her aunt also collects any money taken in and checks with an adult adjacent to the stall to learn how smoothly things are operating. It is striking that she does not directly ask Diouma unless there has been some mistake over the money received. The specialization of their work authenticates it as separate. Another example of this specialization of labor and spatial separation of work is evident within the shoe workshop. Employers’ or adults’ work

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takes place on tables and chairs, whereas the floor is considered children’s workspace. Thiam sits on the floor, as do all child apprentices in this work context, and softens the leather sole and upper for the shoe by working it with a wooden saddle board. Thiam glues the two pieces together, often adding intricate touches of beadwork or painted designs. The adult, on the other hand, works with metal tools while sitting on a tall stool behind a desk. He cuts the leather sole and upper and hammers the heel onto the sole. The specialization of their work tasks is defined in terms of what tools adults use and what tasks adults complete, and equally important, what tools children use and what tasks children complete. Similar patterns of spatial separation and task specialization hold for tailoring workshops as well. Momadou’s tailoring work is distinguished from that of his employer, Lamine Balde, even though they work in the same shop. First, Momadou is generally the one who sews on the machine throughout the workday. Lamine, for his part, spends most of the day outside on the front stoop, taking care of clients. Lamine tells clients that he, himself, will complete certain parts of the sewing project because they are too complicated for Momadou. Also, Momadou is discouraged from speaking with clients. If Momadou discusses or works with clients while Lamine is away, he will be admonished by his employer accordingly. Using his authority of age and power, Lamine maintains the boundary of Momadou as a worker. Further, this sustains and strengthens the distinction between Momadou’s and Lamine’s work, and therefore between children’s and adults’ work. In each of the cases presented above, children labor with or alongside adults, but their work is specialized in terms of the tasks completed, and structured in terms of where they are completed, so that children’s work can be distinguished from and valued differently than adult’s work. Like gender, age is a critical factor shaping children’s work; a hierarchy of age status structures the specialization and separation of children’s and adults’ work. A hierarchy of age status determines who collects the receipts and potential profits in each of these cases. This hierarchy structures not just the work but also the rewards or fruits of labor for child workers. It is through task specialization and spatial distance that children’s low worker status is socially constructed. Each of these cases from Senegal illustrates how this distinction process plays itself out. Even when children toil with adults in the same enterprise, space and distance differentiate their work. Observations from the Senegalese market setting demonstrate how children’s work, because it is separated, can therefore be valued differently from adults’ work. This process works in a similar way to separate men’s and women’s work in varied societies, which has resulted in unequal levels of worth. In this manner, societal expectations and opportunities are structured in the market by a social age status of being child or adult.

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In other African countries, certain types of work are reserved for children. As an example, a father in Zimbabwe directed his son to be absent from school in order to herd animals, because this is set aside as children’s work. The father spent this time at a local bar.20 Likewise, Cameroonian girls are expected first to care for younger siblings and then meet their school demands. In order to accommodate both demands, some of the older children bring their younger siblings to school.21 In rural areas across Africa, children are assigned a progression of tasks by age and maturity in order to learn the skills necessary to run a household or a subsistence farming operation. After age ten to twelve, this work becomes more sex-specific. As discussed in Chapter 2, children in rural Ghana begin work at an early age and augment their work with more complex tasks as they mature. This work may start with such activities as scaring birds and then progress to herding cattle in the case of boys or taking care of younger siblings in the case of girls. Parents are then able to perform other work or tend to civic activities.22 In Kakamega, Kenya, a contrasting pattern involving more overlap of household work tasks exists.23 Almost all boys and girls ages five to nine care for younger siblings. Much like in rural Ghana, by the age of ten to twelve childcare becomes primarily a female task in Kenya. Most girls report that they are responsible for childcare tasks. By the time girls reach age thirteen to eighteen, they begin to transition from childcare into other chores such as cooking or washing clothes. This suggests that girls rotate through childcare responsibilities in middle childhood and then take on more difficult or, in the case of cooking, often more dangerous tasks as they grow older. These cases show how the boundaries separating adult and child work are maintained through the specialization of work tasks and spatial distance. However, there are many instances in the African context where children work alongside parents as a part of their parents’ labor. If this is piecework, as is the case on some coffee and tea plantations in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, the child’s labor is remunerated at an adult rate. However, the household rather than the child realizes the earnings from this labor.

Training as an Organizing Factor and Marker of Children’s Work Most child market labor is regarded as a type of training, an alternative many times to formal schooling, and not something for which a child may receive pay. Generally, children do not receive a salary that they may then decide how to spend. Any income generated is immediately turned over to the household head or sent to their family, who may live in a rural area.

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The apprentices Momadou and Thiam work in order to gain experience and skills. Momadou will likely work for ten years with Lamine in the tailoring business as an apprentice. He neither receives pay nor is compensated for meals. Instead, he eats meals with his uncle, a meat vendor in the market. For now, there are no profits to send home to his family in Guinea. Two other tailors, who are nineteen years old, have just finished ten-year apprenticeships in another workshop and are now working as journeymen for a salary in Lamine’s workshop. One tailor explained that the apprenticeship was long because it took considerable time to learn all of the techniques needed to sew nice clothing. However, the ten-year length of tailoring apprenticeships is a practice adopted during the past fifteen to twenty years. Lamine trained in an apprenticeship for just six years and his father completed a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship. Over time, apprenticeships have become longer. This is probably the result of a precipitous deluge of young people seeking these types of opportunities. The longer the supervisor can keep an apprentice, the longer he can avail himself of free production. Thiam, the shoe apprentice, has a two-year contract to learn the shoe trade in Dakar. His employer pays for his meals and Thiam sleeps in the workshop. Thiam’s employer explained that two years of training in his workshop are better than two years in school, because Thiam will learn a work skill that he can immediately use in Diourbel to support his family. The work contract is not written, but rather is oral and subject to Thiam’s ability to learn the craft. His employer reported that some children take three or four years to learn the shoemaking craft. While apprenticeships offer more specialized training, other market positions open to children, such as selling and carrying, offer skills that are easily transferable. Fatou learns how to negotiate for the hot peppers from the bulk traders, all male, in the Thiaroye market. She also learns how much she has to sell in order to turn a profit. The maids of Anta and Diouma, the hot coffee seller, fall basically into the same type of training position, wherein they learn the selling aspect of their market jobs. They do not work for spending money. Ibrahima, the dried-fish seller, is also considered to be in training—“learning about selling dried fish,” as his father put it. At this point he is required to learn how the women in the market sell fish, and once he has mastered this work, his father will introduce him to the supply end of the business. Ibou’s porter work is considered training as well. Ibou carries purchases for clients and runs errands for market vendors. According to Ibou, if he works hard in this job, he will be rewarded by his family later and obtain an apprenticeship with a craftsman. He is gaining general market experience in order to obtain an apprenticeship. Employers in craft workshops value previous selling experience or some primary school, for these children are

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more disciplined and understand basic addition and subtraction of numbers and so can be sent on errands to procure goods for the workshop. For Cheikh, the religious beggar, his begging in the market is thought to teach him humility and discipline. No religious student beggars report having received formal training in begging skills in the market setting; most indicate that they have taught themselves. Before going to the market early in the morning, during the afternoon, and then after the market closes for the night, Cheikh also learns the Quran by rote. Older students lead the early morning recitations, while the afternoon and evening lessons are led by the marabout himself. Another indication that children’s work is considered training is the degree to which pay is substandard. Among apprenticeships, there is little or no potential for earnings, because these positions are viewed as endowing the child with valuable training. Among selling positions, the potential for earnings varies, and it can be argued that children who give their receipts directly to their parents are realizing the fruit of their labor. Even though girls, like the maids and the coffee seller discussed above, gain additional training in domestic work, neither they nor their families realize the true earnings of the their labor. The organization and conditions of children’s work further clarify the distinction between work and training While an adult entering a trade would not be expected to work as a nonpaid trainee for such an extended period, a child is. If there is a salary, it is turned over immediately to the family, many times not even touching the hand of the child worker. Again, societal definitions and expectations structured through children’s status translate into an emphasis on work for its training value rather than its production or market value. Similar to the work of maids in Dakar, the work of girls as petites bonnes, or “little maids,” in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, demonstrates how child labor is viewed as offering training opportunities for rural girls and, in some cases, income for their families.24 There are three types of girl maids. The “little niece” is unpaid but works full-time for food, boarding, and clothing in a kin-related household in the urban area. Hailing from the rural area, she is viewed as acquiring training instead of money. Second, the “rented child” is recruited from the rural area by an intermediary to be placed in domestic work in an urban nonkin household. The child is supposed to be provided with food, housing, and an income that is paid directly to the tutor. Third, the “little maid” works in a nonkin household in the urban area, and generally continues to live with her parents and collects a monthly salary directly from her employer. In all three cases, the girls’ work goes monetarily underremunerated or unremunerated because these children are viewed as gaining valuable skills. In the first two cases, the fostering household also stands as a pretext to pay little or no salary.

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This is also the case in Tanzania, where children work on tobacco farms and are paid substantially less if they live with farm owners. The wages of children on tobacco farms are far less than the minimum pay in the country.25 Because children work to be trained, and this appears to be connected to an age status as well, the value of their labor is compromised. Training stands out as a mechanism that organizes children’s work, and the concept of providing training for a child rests with the household.

Household Strategies That Organize Children’s Work The incomes these children earn are vital to their households. The work they do is part of a household economic strategy. Children working in urban markets of Senegal were found to bring in U.S.$1 on average per day, or about U.S.$300 per year. This is a sizable income compared with average annual income of U.S.$500 per capita in Senegal.26 Fatou brings in about 600 CFA francs, or U.S.$1.25, every day in profit. Ibrahima gives his daily earnings, 1,000 CFA francs, or U.S.$2, to his father. The porter, Ibou, gives all of his profit to his father. Mariama does not keep for herself any of the money she earns while working beside her father—the money goes directly to him. Diouma’s coffee sales provide income for her aunt, and her aunt, in return, trains Diouma, who is expected to help set up her own coffee-selling business in the future. Therefore, even though there is no set amount that Diouma or her family is being paid now, she will be reimbursed later. Momadou and Thiam, the apprentices, are learning a trade that will support their families in the future. Hadji, Mariama, and Rafine, the maids, give their revenues from peanut sales directly to Anta, their employer. Anta then gives a percentage of the girls’ monthly salary to their families in the village. The maids not only assist their own families, but also make monetary contributions to their employer’s family. The maids are introduced to outsiders as family members and seem to be incorporated into their employer’s family. It is unclear, however, whether the girls can make reciprocal claims on their adopted family. Anta does not speak of any long-term connection with the maids. In this case the idiom of kinship is used to mask the calculated work relationship Anta shares with the maids.27 These maids work with Anta, earn some cash for their households, and develop some selling skills, but the real profit is realized by Anta, who on average makes about U.S.$19 per month in profit, after paying the overhead for the peanut business and paying the girls’ families about U.S.$6 per month each as well as paying for the girls’ food and shelter.28 Household strategies are not just short-term economic gains, but should also be viewed as calculated tactics that provide for the child and

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the family. When the rural mother of a ten-year-old girl makes the decision to send her daughter to work as a market seller with a female relative in Dakar, she considers the potential economic, educational, and social gains for the girl, and the cost of losing her daughter’s work in the home and field. The child’s experience as a market seller is viewed as training for an adult career, and the responsibilities of clothing and feeding the child now rest with the urban household employing her. In this case, the use of extended-family resources and obligations combined with urban migration can be considered a strategy undertaken by the rural household to provide for and train its members. The child’s work experience contributes to the parental household now and in the future. Cheikh also contributes to a household budget, that of his marabout. Each talibe child contributes to the budget, and in return each child receives one hot meal per week, medicine when needed, and housing. Cheikh’s rural household has relinquished his care entirely to the urban religious leader and does not benefit directly from his begging work in the market. Household economic strategies thus vary from case to case; some families send their children to work in order to meet immediate family needs, while others secure apprenticeships for their children so that they will have a source of support in the future. It is a combination of the economic level of the parental household coupled with its social relations or social capital that weighs heavily in shaping educational, training, and income opportunities for children. These cases emphasize how children’s work can be part of both a short-term and a long-term strategy that a household undertakes. Again, the desolate opportunity landscape of the rural milieu becomes a prominent factor. Some households are able to utilize kin relations to train and provide opportunities for their children in urban areas. Other households utilize whatever social relations are available, and often nonkin relations, to secure opportunities for their children in urban areas. Like most children in the Senegalese market ethnography, most children who work on coffee or tea estates in Zimbabwe are providing income to their families. In some cases, a child has become the breadwinner in the family. Dorcas, a fifteen-year-old orphaned girl, has three younger siblings who live with her grandmother. She supports the household and pays the school fees for her brothers and sisters.29 Likewise, children who work in commercial agriculture in Tanzania are found to keep some pocket money but give the substantial share of their income to their parents for food and basic household items. On tobacco estates in Urambo, Tanzania, a majority of children send or give money to their parents.30 Also, in 2002, about 45 percent of children working on coffee plantations in Karatu district in Tanzania reported that they used their earnings to supplement meager family income to buy basic necessities such as food.31 Across these studies, children’s work is considered necessary but only a contributing piece to the household economic pie.

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Age as a Structural Factor of Childhood and Children’s Work In order to analyze the issues of child labor, we need to reassert the significance of age as an analytic tool and focus on how it shapes expectations and opportunities in any given society.32 If we consider children as a stratum in a socially constructed “age hierarchy” framework, we can see how age influences children’s workplace positions, earning power, and overall life experiences. As seen in Senegal, children who work have limited life choices because of their low status as children, and their parents make most of the career choices. The positions open to children are generally the least desirable and lowest paid, and children have little, if any, control over the conditions under which they work. Much like women in the developing country context who occupy low-status positions and are rarely promoted,33 children are limited in these same ways, but through their age status. When novices of older age status begin their apprenticeships for a tailor, a younger child in the workshop, even if he has worked for several years, will continue to hold the lowest status. Adults who enter a trade with less experience than already-skilled children are incorporated into higher positions and receive higher pay simply because of their age-based seniority. Children are aware that they are paid less than adults for the same work. A ten-year-old Kenyan boy working from Mokowe, Kenya, explains, “I feel that I am being misused. I work for a long time. This is not fair. The money they give me is not sufficient and the elders are paid more than me.”34 The inequality that exists between this boy’s wage and the wage of adults doing the same increases his dissatisfaction. He complains that he is unable to buy even the basic essentials of a decent life, such as clothing and food for his family, nor is he able to pay school fees. Children’s domestic work is devalued in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, where young girls do the household work of adults but are referred to as petites bonnes. These “little maids” from rural areas generally work eleven-hour days in the households of distant kin and many times nonkin. Even though they provide a full range of household chores, their labor is undervalued because they are children and they are not considered to be full maids.35 Likewise, children who work in mining in Zimbabwe generally work the same labor hours as adults, seven days a week, eight hours a day, but receive less pay than the adults doing the same job. When children work alongside adults for the same pay, their work is generally referred to as being different. For children who work part-time with their parents in these positions, their labor is subsumed under that of the adult. How people perceive and discuss children’s work, and how they separate it in their minds from adults’ work, results in a socially constructed lower status for the former. In this way, societal expectations and work opportunities can be struc-

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tured by the age of the child worker. The younger the child is upon beginning work, the lower his or her status as laborer, which is reinforced by the often fewer years of formal schooling he or she can access.

Conclusion: Implications of Stratification Influences for Children This chapter has demonstrated how children enter specific types of market work through a prism of intersecting processes of gender, ethnicity, locale, kinship, spatial relations, task differentiation, and age. While child labor is a function of poverty, these factors structure the kind of work children do and influence children’s relationships to their households and employers. Both gender and age stand as key stratifying factors in the market setting for children. Other factors also come into play in creating the relationships that bring children into market work. The boundaries between adults’ and children’s employment are maintained by the way the work environment is structured and spatially divided, and the different social statuses of adults and children are reflected in their disparate levels of compensation. The age hierarchy determines how children’s market work is valued differently than adults’ work. Further, the age hierarchy determines how children’s work is socially constructed through the specialization and separation of their market labor. The position of children in the work force is inextricably linked to their position in society. For many households, children’s work is vital to short-term and longterm survival strategies. Understanding the organization of children’s market work makes it even clearer that the economic level of the household is not the sole criterion for explaining children’s employment opportunities. Children’s market work demonstrates the importance of gender and age status in shaping social expectations and structuring opportunities for children. While parents’ social networks and backgrounds provide the missing pieces of the puzzle within this context, the placement of children into work roles is a dynamic process that differs from child to child, household to household, community to community, and culture to culture.

Notes 1. Sector. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kadonya, Mtuana, and Madihi, Tanzania Child Labour in the Informal Bass, “Beyond Homework,” p. 23. Katz, “Introduction,” p. 6. Reskin and Hartmann, Women’s Work, Men’s Work. Callaway and Creevey, The Heritage of Islam.

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6. While peanut and agricultural production has shrunk as a percentage of national income since 1970, the industrial and service sectors have expanded. Today, the service sector includes tourism and accounts for the largest percentage of national income. 7. This concurs with the work of Evelyn Glenn on women’s and men’s work roles in the U.S. labor market. See Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work.” 8. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 9. International Labour Organization (ILO), Child Labor in Tourism. 10. Ibid. 11. Porter, “The Agency of Children.” 12. Sharp, “The Work Ideology of Malagasy Children.” 13. Katz, “Sow What You Know.” 14. Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work.” 15. Sow, “Muslim Families.” 16. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 17. Hunt, “Children’s Rights in West Africa.” 18. Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 19. Sow, “African Women, Family, and Laws,” p. 6. 20. Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 21. Nsamenang, “Early Childhood Care and Education.” 22. Oppong, Growing Up in Dagbon, p. 51. 23. Kayongo and Walji, Children at Work in Kenya. 24. Jacquemin, “Le travail domestique des enfants.” 25. Masudi et al., Tanzania Child Labour. 26. Gross national product per capita is taken from Table 3.1 and resembles the annual income based on average daily profit data from a national child worker survey. Bass, Working for Peanuts. 27. Hansen, “Labor Migration and Urban Child Labor.” 28. Receipts were U.S.$30 per month (U.S.$1.25/day for twenty-four days), overhead expenses were U.S.$5 per month, and the cost of food and shelter was U.S.$6 per month. 29. Bourdillon, Earning a Life. 30. Masudi et al., Tanzania Child Labour. 31. Nchahaga, Tanzania Children. 32. Elson, “The Differentiation of Children’s Labor.” 33. Humphrey, Gender and Work in the Third World. 34. ILO, Child Labor in Tourism, p. 1. 35. Jacquemin, “Le travail domestique des enfants.”

7 Expendable Laborers: Children as Soldiers, Prostitutes, and Slaves

Ten-year-old Aminata traveled nearly 1,000 miles from her village in Togo to the capital city of Gabon, Libreville, with a child recruiter who visited her parents and arranged for Aminata’s work. Aminata was found by social workers under a park bench in Libreville with fresh whip wounds on her legs. She was supposed to sell cakes on the street, but was punished for not bringing in enough money.1 Thirteen-year-old Constance from Benin was recruited to work in neighboring Nigeria by a trafficker. After talking with the recruiter, his parents were given an advance on Constance’s wages and thought that their son would earn good money and receive an education. That was the last payment the parents received.2 Two sisters, eight-year-old Pelagy and six-year-old Jocelyne, were taken from Benin to Libreville, Gabon, to work as domestics for the same family. Their employer’s children attended school, but the sisters carried out various domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, washing, and sewing. The girls were also forced to work in market vending. If their earnings disappointed their employer, they were tied up as a form of punishment.3 The children found in exploitative forms of child labor resemble other children in less horrendous forms of work in that they are generally from poor, rural families with many children and uneducated parents. These children diverge from over 90 percent of child workers to the extent that most come from households wherein the parental link has been severed. These children become detached from their parents as a result of the most extreme forms

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of poverty, theft, naive parents who negotiate with intermediaries or recruiters, death of the parents, and war. The most exploitative forms of child labor make for interesting journalistic reading. Headline after headline during the summer of 2001 recounted the travels of a ship suspected of being filled with child slaves off the coast of western Africa. A major headline from that year read, “President: Nigerian Child Slaves Die Off Coast.” 4 Once that headline found broad public appeal, another major headline read, “The Bondage of Poverty That Produces Chocolate.”5 The dirty laundry of the chocolate industry was then aired. These children are a part of western Africa’s slave trade, which has attracted some international attention. Some children lose contact with their families. Some may not be heard from again. All of these children will likely be found working as forced laborers under horrific conditions on plantations or as domestic servants. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell described this form of people trafficking as “a modern-day form of slavery.”6 Most of the working children profiled in this book are connected to families, and their work can be viewed as part of a household survival strategy. These children generally are not found in what are referred to as the worst forms of child labor. In this chapter, I profile some of the most exploitative forms of children’s labor in sub-Saharan Africa. The common thread that links many of these children is a breakdown of community and family structures, often as a result of disease, abject poverty, and civil war. Indeed, research on the highly exploitative labor of talibe religious beggars in Senegal argues that the protection of children is no longer the responsibility of the community but is the private business of the family unit, which has a compromised ability to protect and provide for children.7 In some cases, the family structure exists, but in a subordinate form, as in the case of children of chattel slaves in Mauritania. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 8.4 million children worldwide are involved in the unconditional worst forms of child labor, as defined in ILO Convention 182, Article 3.8 These unconditional worst forms include trafficked children, forced and bonded labor, armed conflict, prostitution and pornography, and work in illegal activities. Many children have been orphaned as a result of the AIDS pandemic in eastern and southern Africa. Many children have also been orphaned, captured, thrown away, or enslaved as a result of two distinct processes, poverty in rural areas and conflict. The analysis of armed conflict includes not only children who are recruited or forced to fight, but also those children who provide supportive labor in armed conflicts through work as prostitutes, cooks, and porters. I also address children who undertake religious begging in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Children Who Work as Slaves In the large Adjame market of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, investigators discovered a “maid market” wherein young girls were being bought and sold from a ramshackle, corrugated iron and wood shack.9 A small group of slaves who had been liberated from the estimated 20,000 slaves in Niger again showed children substantially represented.10 In the late 1990s the Sudanese government was implicated in the practice of allowing marauders to carry out “slave raids” in which innocent women and children were captured and then sold as domestic and agricultural slaves.11 Amnesty International estimates that 90,000 black Africans still live as “property” of Arab Berbers in Mauritania, and that 300,000 freed slaves are trapped both psychologically and economically into continued servitude under their former masters.12 Additionally, as many as 3,000 girls live in bondage as part of the Trokosi institution in the Volta delta of Ghana,13 where girls and young women provide physical labor and sex to shrine priests to atone for sins committed by their relatives. Slave families at Taudenni in the north of Mali mine the salt blocks sold in Mopti. International law on slavery draws on Article 7 of the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery. According to this convention, slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. More recent theorizing about modern forms of slavery and highly exploitative forms of work outlines three basic forms of slavery: chattel, debt bondage, and contractual.14 Chattel slaves are people captured, born, or sold into permanent servitude, and ownership is often asserted. Debt bondage, the most common form of slavery in the world, enslaves a person as a guarantee against a loan of money, most often with an ambiguous agreement and repayment terms. Contract slaves are trapped in highly exploitative jobs that use force or the threat of force and modern labor relations to hide the servitude. In modern slavery, work contracts may be issued to chattel slaves or to girls in debt bondage to mask their servitude. In these cases, employees are not held to the payment terms of the contract, while girls are forced to continue working without payment. Such masked servitude provides convincing evidence that slavery exists in sub-Saharan Africa today.

Niger In Niger, slavery is against the law but chattel slaves have been kept for centuries in the northern part of the country. There are an estimated 20,000 slaves, who are especially concentrated in towns such as Acadez and Zinder.15 Chattel slavery is the dominant form, but liberated slaves report that they have been starved, tortured, and beaten into submission. Liberated

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chattel slaves report that women and girls complete all types of household tasks, including gathering firewood and water, and that owners rape both women and girl slaves regularly. Slave men are used in agricultural production for the owner’s household. It is not uncommon for freed slaves to have fresh wounds on their bodies, which provides some evidence that slavery in Niger today takes a chattel form but also may be defined as a modern form of slavery that forces people to continue working through violence or the threat of violence.16

Sudan Slavery is rooted in Sudan’s history, and is part of its war-stricken present.17 Abuk Achian, now eighteen years old, was six years old when Arab raiders stole her from her parents’ village in southern Sudan, carrying her off on horseback and enslaving her.18 Abuk comes from the Dinka ethnic group, a black African people who follow both Christian and animist teachings. Much like the case in Mauritania, the kidnappers and eventually the masters in Sudan are lighter-skinned Arabs who follow Islamic teachings. Now free, she explains, “I was so scared. I couldn’t understand the language that they spoke and I was crying. But they beat me until I stopped crying and started to learn their language.”19 She was not allowed to speak to other Dinka and her master beat her into submission. Her owner expected her to milk and tend the camel herd, which she did without being paid for twelve years. Abuk is one of many thousands estimated to be enslaved in Sudan, yet the Sudanese government denies that slavery exists and acknowledges only a handful of abductions. Sudan’s ambassador to the United States, Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, contends, “There are no slaves . . . there is a vicious portrayal about Sudan.”20 The Sudanese ambassador also denies that the government sponsors or condones slavery, and maintains that warring tribes may abduct hostages but that this is not enslavement. The U.S. State Department’s 1995 human rights report on Sudan notes that groups backed by the government in Khartoum abduct men, women, and children from rebel areas in the south and take them to government-controlled areas in the north of the country. In Sudan the government is of no consequence regarding enforcement, because it actually sponsors the raiding groups that traffic in Dinka people. Christian organizations have sought to end this slavery by purchasing slaves and then releasing them. These efforts have been of limited use in freeing slaves, as local hucksters posing as slave traders often sell fake slaves many times over. These efforts likely serve only to alleviate people’s guilt and horror in richer countries, while local traders become quite affluent in the process. Sanctions against either the Sudanese government or the

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Canadian oil company Talisman, which operates in the country, have also been tried. These efforts have resulted in a reduced Western presence, which can be argued as a potential force for change. As a result of this approach, China, unconcerned with the domestic slave situation, has become a more dominant player in Sudan’s oil industry. A workable solution to this problem has not been offered.

Mauritania In Mauritania, slavery persists even though a 1980 proclamation and a 1981 ordinance limit and abolish it, a fact of which many Mauritanians are unaware. Both chattel and the modern forms of contract slavery exist, typically persisting between former slaves and their masters. Even today, as stated above, large numbers of black Africans, whom local authorities overlook, still live as property of Arab Berbers. Perhaps the most perplexing group are those 300,000 slaves who have been freed but who do not have the freedom to live independently of their former masters.21 In a majority of cases, it is not chattel slavery, but a different type of dependence, that enslaves people, especially those who reside in abject poverty in rural areas and who are isolated from opportunities to educate their children, buy land, or attain a wage-earning job. In many ways, urbanization has had an emancipation effect on society, wherein freed and escaped slaves might access more income opportunities and retain control of their earnings in the city than is possible in the countryside. Still, children are reported as being sold into slavery. In 1990 the parents of a ten- to twelve-year-old black boy planned a several-month absence from their home and put their son in the custody of a relative. The relative sold the child for about U.S.$400. The relative perhaps did not realize that selling the child was illegal or perhaps did not feel that authorities would enforce the law. Also, fostering disguises slavery in urban areas. Households will often disguise the real status of a slave by referring to him or her as a member of the family or as being taken care of by the household head.22 To this end, there is a real ambiguity between domestic child labor and slavery in the Mauritanian context. It is difficult to distinguish slave children from poor children of the extended family structure. The true status of slave or domestic servant is often hidden in the urban milieu.

Ghana: Paying Family Wrongs with Trokosi Girls In Ghana, thousands of girls are enslaved to atone for their families’ sins according to the Trokosi tradition. The terms of their servitude are not spelled out, so families may be required to submit girls for servitude over

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several generations. Trokosi girls, some as young as ten, are forced to become the physical and sexual slaves of shrine priests to please the gods. Among the Ewe people of northern Ghana, Trokosi tradition began about 100 years ago. When families were unable to atone for an offense by raising money to buy the prescribed cattle, the shrine priest was offered a virgin daughter from the wrongdoing family. This offer was gratefully accepted, and a new tradition was born. In theory, the Trokosi girls are wives and servants to the gods. In some cases, the giving of a daughter is only ceremonial, so not all Trokosi girls become slaves, which makes regulation complicated. In practice, many Trokosi girls are not free to leave and must serve as the priests’ cooks, farmhands, cleaners, and mistresses.23 One woman explains why she is a slave to the shrine: “My grandfather had illegal sex with a woman. The gods punished our family.” While a few mothers may try to send their daughters away to the capital so that they will not become Trokosi, these cases are rare. The Ghanaian government passed a law in September 1998 making it illegal to send a child away from home for a religious ritual, but enforcement remains a challenge. In the Volta delta, few policemen will act directly against the priests even when they practice Christianity or Islam. The fetish is much revered. An approach that has proved more effective is persuading priests to give up their Trokosi girls in exchange for cattle.24 Overall, the Trokosi institution finds its longevity in poverty and inequality, as both of these factors come into play during the arrangements for young girls to serve priests. Just as the institution arose when poor families could not buy the necessary cattle to atone for the sins of a household member, the institution continues to be a reality among families with the fewest resources. Because the slave work of these girls varies from ceremonial to arduous, and because it remains masked by indigenous religion, regulation and enforcement are difficult. Despite the difficulty in distinguishing between the slaves and servants from the ceremonial Trokosi girls, the complexity does not cancel the reality of the slave labor that exists.

Borrowed, Brokered, and Sold: Trafficked Children The slave trade has not stopped but evolved in western Africa. While trafficked children are only sometimes chattel slaves, the trafficking of children is a modern-day form of slavery. Trafficking is the movement of people from one place to another through force, coercion, or deception to exploit them for their labor. This new form of slavery is fueled by poverty, vulnerability, and lack of political will. Like other forms of child labor, it is often patterned by rural-urban background and inequity of resources. Kevin Bales notes in his recent bestselling book Disposable People

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that “child labor is terrible, but is not necessarily slavery.”25 Most children continue to work with their parents in family enterprises and on family farms. However, data from a 2002 large-scale rural household survey gathered in Benin show that 14 percent of all children who migrated to urban areas, and 19 percent of all children who emigrated to other countries, left their villages in the care of strangers.26 These children, who compose a substantial proportion of migrant children in the rural area, are the most vulnerable to being sold into slavery. In this way, the slope from child labor to slavery can be extremely slippery. Increasingly, children are bought and sold within and across national borders. They are trafficked for domestic work, prostitution, begging work, work on cotton and coffee plantations, and work on construction sites. These children are especially vulnerable when they migrate a lengthy distance from their parents or to another country, where they lose contact with families. Most of these children do not have language skills and therefore are at the mercy of their employers. Forced labor is a growing concern in western and central Africa often as a result of poverty, especially for those in rural areas. The root of modern-day trafficking is the custom of child fostering, in which parents may send their children to live with relations and friends for economic or moral reasons. Today, this tradition has been seriously eroded and corrupted by an admixture of various motives between agents and parents who often collude to send children to serve in homes, work on farms, or do some kind of labor in exchange for money. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that 200,000 children are traded in western Africa each year, but this is a rough number. 27 In Benin, when the corn harvest is bad, child smugglers and recruiters traverse the red-dirt roads connecting the villages with the big city, offering money and promises of a better life.28 They prey on villagers’ hopes for an education for their children, a good wage, a full belly. Some parents hope they are handing over their children to a better education or job, while others, embroiled in poverty, are looking to offload their children for financial gain. Gabon has oil wealth and a very small population. Togo and Benin have serious rural poverty, so supply meets demand. Children ages seven to eighteen are sold mostly from Benin and Togo, and wind up in the relatively wealthy oil-exporting neighboring areas around Lagos in Nigeria and Libreville in Gabon. Other countries importing child slave labor are Niger, Burkina Faso, and the Central African Republic. Data of nearly 20,000 children from rural Benin show that, in 2002, about one in five children had left their villages. Of these children who left, two-thirds did so with the explicit goal of working. Of these working children, 60 percent left to work in other places in Benin and 40 percent left to work in other countries such as Nigeria, Gabon, and Côte d’Ivoire.29 Within

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Benin, most trafficked children end up in the larger cities of the country, such as Porto Novo, Parakou, and the capital, Cotonou. Among those children trafficked abroad, most boys end up working on plantations in Côte d’Ivoire, while most girls find domestic service or street vendor work in Gabon. The contract arrangements between villagers and traffickers are often verbal, as most villagers cannot read or write. One father in a Benin village allowed his son to leave with traffickers eleven years ago on a two-year contract, but he is still waiting for his son to come home. In this case, the father does not speak French and is illiterate, but signed a contract jointly with the child and the trafficker. The contract reads, “Kossouvi Norbert recognizes to have given his child to Mr. Agbonneo Sime. The money I’ll make in 2 years will be 200,000 CFA.” Underneath, the father’s signature rests above the signatures of the trafficker and the child.30 Rural children and a few destitute urban children compose the population of trafficked children. Data gathered from rural families in Mali provide a powerful explanatory profile of rural children who are at risk of being trafficked. These children come from families with little education. Roughly half of child labor migrants (48 percent of those working in Benin, 54 percent of those working in other countries) attend some formal schooling. Nearly 90 percent of children have mothers with no formal education. Also, children of farming households and mother-headed households are more likely to migrate away from the village for work.31

The Traffickers Traffickers do well by rural standards, but they are not getting rich by any means. For example, a Benin woman apprehended for trafficking children reports that she was actually trafficked from Benin to Nigeria when she was a young girl.32 Through trafficking in her adult life, she has been able to send her own children to school and live a comfortable life in Nigeria. Before being arrested, she worked as an intermediary, trafficking children from Benin to Nigeria for domestic service for twenty-six years. The employers in Nigeria would provide money for a child’s transportation and the trafficker would arrange for it. The employer paid her about U.S.$9 when she delivered a child. On average, she trafficked about three ten- to twelve-year-old children every month. In Senegal, girls often assist women market sellers as a means of being exposed to potential employers. One international migrant from Mali, a woman from the Bambara ethnic group, sells infant and toddler clothing in a central market of Dakar with a rural-based maid from Mali in tow. The girl is expected to keep the stall in order, but more important, she is kept on display for potential employers. The market vendor uses her stall to show-

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case the girl for future employment and trades in more than clothing. Over the course of two years of participant observation, she had eight different girls working with her in the clothing stall. She actively places girls into domestic work in foreign countries regardless of the children’s language skills. The market vendor explains that both she and the girls’ families are paid an annual salary for the girls’ labor. However, whether the girls’ families receive any money beyond an initial payment is murky at best. Indeed, more research is needed in this area because these girls are trafficked and they do not realize the full product of their labor, but they could very well be slaves as well and the central market is just a step in the process of being sold for a price.

Selling Domestic Workers and Sometimes Sex In Benin there are an estimated 150,000 child domestic workers between the ages of four and fourteen, with the majority starting work at about age ten.33 About 80 percent are girls, due to the belief that parents view domestic work as a safe environment. In Benin, in cases where children are severely incapacitated due to illness, employers prefer to send them home, often a journey of several hundred miles, rather than seek treatment for them. Verbal abuse is common, physical abuse is substantial, and sexual abuse is also found. The exploitation of child domestic workers remains largely hidden. There are few legal safeguards to protect child domestics, and authorities are reticent to intervene in private matters that occur in homes. Physically separated from families, many Benin children are trafficked across national borders to work in Gabon. Research in 2000, based on interviews with 884 people, 654 in Benin and 230 in Gabon, sought to explain the causes and consequences of children trafficked from the former to the latter. Most trafficked children, 149 of 170 (88 percent), were coming from three administrative regions, or departments, in Benin.34 Of the 91 trafficked children who were interviewed in Benin, 61 were girls as young as seven (67 percent). Of the 138 trafficked children who were interviewed in Gabon, nearly all were girls (99 percent). Girls are in greater demand for domestic and market selling work. Many of the children who are returned home are subsequently trafficked again, and more parents are accompanying their children across the initial border before entrusting them to traffickers in such countries as Togo and Nigeria. The girls documented in this research referred to their sponsors as “aunties” so people would assume that they were family members and not being trafficked from other countries. Almost all employers were women (95 percent),35 and the traffickers paid border officials to let them and the girls pass. Benin’s government resists describing the modern practice of traffick-

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ing as child slavery. However, there is increasing pressure from international groups to curb the trafficking of children. As a result, UNICEF reports that the number of trafficked children intercepted at the Benin border rose from 117 in 1995 to 1,081 two years later. In 1997, Benin police arrested five West Africans caught preparing to ship ninety child slaves to Gabon after they had bought the youngsters in Benin and Togo for as little as U.S.$1.50 each. Families sell their children, mainly girls, for between U.S.$1.50 and U.S.$14; they are then passed on and sold into labor. Girls work as domestic servants and market traders, while boys work on the cotton and cocoa plantations or in fisheries.36 The traffickers make up to U.S.$340 for each child sold. The children are often not paid and may be beaten, and some girls are sexually abused. Traffickers and brokers often scout for families who have more children than they can easily support. On arrival, children face cruelty and poverty from their sponsors, mainly women, who are often known as “aunties.” Some girls who fail to show enough earnings from market selling are forced into sexual exploitation and prostitution. In Nigeria about 40 percent of street and working children are estimated to be trafficked. Girls, who are twice as likely as boys to be trafficked, may end up in domestic or prostitute work in Nigeria or even abroad. Nigerian girls are found in Europe working as domestics and prostitutes, and make up an estimated 60 percent of prostitutes in Italy.37 In Benin, boys are slightly more likely than girls to be trafficked. In 2000, two eleven-year-old Benin girls were taken into the custody of social services in the UK after they ran away from Nigerian and Benin expatriate families.38 The overall pattern is that poor rural families will arrange for their children to work in the urban milieu with a trafficker for a set sum of money paid in advance. Girls, who typically end up working as domestic servants and market traders, but may end up in prostitution, are represented in the trafficked population at higher rates than boys. Boys are traded to a lesser extent to work on the cotton and cocoa plantations or in fisheries.

Stalled Setting Sail with a Slave Cargo The Nigerian ship MV Etireno attracted international attention when UN officials found child slaves aboard in July 2001. These children came from poor families in western and central Africa, and had been tricked into work or sold into labor agreements. The ship had been refused dock at ports in Libreville, Gabon, and Douala, Cameroon, while carrying between 25 and 250 children believed to be destined for the slave trade. This case sparked concern and an international search, but no convincing conclusion. After being turned away from the two African ports, the ship headed back to Cotonou, Benin.

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International attention did help the scrutiny of the children aboard the Eterino. At the same time, the two-week mystery of this ship and its cargo shows how difficult it is to detect children being trafficked from children being fostered. First reports showed no unaccompanied children, but economic migrants with their children. When UNICEF took thirty-one children off the ship to be interviewed, the adults who first posed as parents scattered. In the end, just one child remained with a parent. The number of children was not as high as initial estimates, but the Etireno was carrying child slaves, and the supposed parents were child traffickers. The older children reported that they were going to work, while the younger ones did not know where they were going. All of the children wanted to go home to their mothers. A few months later, sixty-eight children thought to be the victims of child labor trafficking were rescued from a sinking ship off the coast of Cameroon.39 Children from Nigeria, Mali, Benin, and Togo were among those saved. Togolese officials reported that the children were in the process of traveling to Gabon for work. While girls from poorer countries are trafficked to work as domestics and prostitutes in more affluent countries, boys are most often trafficked for work in commercial agriculture.

Children and Chocolate: Slavery or Poverty? Many children from Mali and Burkina Faso are thought to be in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, which produces cocoa for almost half of the world’s chocolate and exports U.S.$1.4 billion of cocoa annually. Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria rank as the world’s first, second, and fourth largest cocoa producers. However, the distinction between slave trading and the bondage of poverty is sometimes unclear. Reporters from one North American newspaper reported finding only a few children at work on Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa plantations. Almost all of the workers in Côte d’Ivoire were adults from Mali and Burkina Faso.40 Mali and Burkina Faso, both landlocked and semiarid, are poor countries where families tend to be large. The prospect of work on a cocoa plantation for cash wages of U.S.$165 a year is viewed from afar as a veritable opportunity. Another North American newspaper reporter found that on ten plantations visited in remote areas, child labor was found on all but one. 41 These visits by reporters took place after a BBC documentary was aired in Europe and North America exposing Côte d’Ivoire’s cocoa plantations as being rampant with “chocolate slaves,” many of whom were children. Using children to work on cocoa plantations in Côte d’Ivoire was much more popular a few years ago, especially before international press agencies learned about and revealed these slavelike work relations. However, the Ivorian government maintains that fewer foreigners have migrated to

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Côte d’Ivoire for work since the 1998 drop in cocoa prices and political instability. The Ivorian government also notes that a bilateral agreement signed in September 2000 allows Côte d’Ivoire to repatriate Malian children found working there. The Ivorian government fears an international boycott of their chocolate and maintains that child labor once was a problem but is now under control. The Ivorian government also contends that if child slavery exists, then it exists only on foreign-owned plantations, because Malians and Burkinabè bring their young relatives to Côte d’Ivoire to work for them without wages.42 An interview with one farmer corroborates the idea that child labor on cocoa plantations is on the decline. Drissa, fifty-seven years old, lives in the center of the cocoa-growing region of Côte d’Ivoire in a one-room house without electricity or running water.43 During his thirty-three years as a cocoa farmer on a forty-eight-acre plantation, he has earned enough to buy a tractor and send eight of his twenty children to primary school. Although he may do well by the standards of neighboring Mali, he is still poor compared with city dwellers in his own country. He had seven or eight young workers from Mali a few years ago, but now reports having just two, brothers ages fourteen and eighteen. These brothers, the first and second oldest of nine children from a large subsistence-farm family, are too poor to afford an ox. Drissa explained that it is impossible to discuss payment or establish a formal contract before the work begins because the salary depends on the price he gets for the cocoa. Another approach to curbing slave labor, including child slave labor, on cocoa plantations has been initiated through an international group that provides a “fair trade” logo to products made under ethical standards. One of these products, a fifty-gram milk chocolate bar made with real coffee from Ghana and sugar from Costa Rica, costs over twice as much, U.S.$1.20 compared to U.S.55¢, as a chocolate bar without the logo. If labeling chocolate as “fair trade” is expensive, then most people will take their risks and opt for the inexpensive option. Further, labeling chocolate may be meaningless, given the extensive chain that exists between plantations that employ children and the export sellers. Agents buy cocoa from farmers, who in turn sell the cocoa to exporters in Abidjan. Generally, the exporters are not plantation owners but wealthy Africans, French, or Lebanese businessmen, who then sell the cocoa beans to companies like Nestlé and Hershey, which then use it to make chocolate. Also, local plantation owners may be able to pay a small sum to underpaid civil servants in order to have their chocolate labeled “child free” or “traffic free.” Large companies and their organizations take different perspectives on the issue of child slavery on cocoa plantations. Some deny responsibility, as is the case of the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate, and Confectionery Alliance, which maintains, “We do not believe that the farms visited by the BBC pro-

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gramme are in the least representative of cocoa farming in Côte d’Ivoire, although these claims cannot be ignored.” 44 Others, such as Nestlé, acknowledge that there is a problem with the forced labor of children and adults, and give lip service to the need of finding a solution. Nestlé states, “We are deeply concerned about this issue and are actively working with other manufacturers in our trade association to find a solution. These are illegal acts which must be stamped out and we fully support the effort being made by the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Mali to do so.”45 Whether some of these children are slaves or highly exploited workers is still open to debate, but with careful study, cases of children could probably be assigned judiciously into each camp. An export product, such as cocoa, and large multinational corporations provide the context in which the work of these children becomes newsworthy and even labeled a social ill. The emphasis on the cocoa industry is clearly the result of the negative international press and fears of a boycott of Côte d’Ivoire’s most important crop. Unfortunately, there has been scant interest in the fate of the young girls who are also brought to Côte d’Ivoire in large numbers to work as nannies, domestic servants, and kitchen maids.46

Trafficked into Sex Work and Prostitution Girls and, to a lesser extent, boys are trafficked into sex work. Little is known of their backgrounds. In 2001, when Guinean police busted one of the syndicates that trafficks West African girls for Europe’s sex trade, thirty-five children ages thirteen to nineteen were discovered and eighteen people connected with their trafficking were arrested. 47 The girls and agents were all Nigerians. The girls had been lured into the trade by agents in Nigeria who offered to pay them as much as U.S.$1,771 each. From Guinea, they would have returned to Mali with false passports and been sold to brothel owners in Spain or Italy through agents in Morocco and Algeria. The girls would then be required to pay the brothel owner U.S.$400 for their freedom.48 Sexual exploitation of domestic servants is common in sub-Saharan Africa, and middle-aged “sugar daddies” frequently provide girls with money for school fees, books, and clothes.49 The use of domestic labor in private homes has always been one of the most grave and common forms of child exploitation. But the historical solidarity networks through which rural families sent their children to urban relatives and friends to improve their chances of education and employment have degenerated into monetary transactions in which recruiters benefit from the profits. When war disrupts rural economies, many children are forced onto the streets, such as in Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and it is common to find children as young as ten who have been sexually

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Case in Point 7.1 Benin Dreams from dust and poverty

When the harvest is bad in Benin, respectable-looking traders travel from village to village in search of children. They offer povertystrapped parents cash, generally U.S.$20–$40, and promise a better life, training, and a successful future for children, most often in the big city.50 Most of these children return to the village as poor as when they left, and some girls return from domestic service pregnant. Some children are never heard from again. However, there are a few children who return to the village with a bicycle or a radio as payment, which is very impressive to other dirt-poor children and their parents. And then there are the legendary stories of children who come home from work with the means to build their parents a house.51 Actual cases of such children are hard to find. Still, these stories of hope coupled with crippling poverty frame the decisionmaking process for children and their parents. This hope is often dashed as children venture off to work without parental supervision or possible intervention, leaving them open to exploitative work and abusive conditions. Two cases of girls trafficked to Benin demonstrate these conditions. A thirteen-year-old girl named Chizoba was a house servant in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1997.52 Her owner would tie her down to keep her from running away. In another case, a nine-year-old girl named Kasarachi served a family with four children. She started her day at dawn by sweeping the continues

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Case in Point 7.1 continued house and washing the dishes before the children woke up, after which she would help them get ready for school. Her next duty was to finish cleaning the house and tend the mother’s market stall until the children returned from school. Kasarachi would help the children undress and bathe, and wash their clothes. When the mother came back from the market, Kasarachi would wash the woman’s clothes too. Her day as servant usually ended at 1 A.M. The family would eat two meals a day, but she was allowed only one. “I would work late, but the women would beat me every day. Then her children would laugh and hit me, too.”53 In both of these cases, the girls are not treated as family by their urban employers, yet they are outside of the protective supervision of their parents. The intermediary who placed them is long gone, leaving these girls with little recourse. Some girls have sought protection from the local police, but have been told that the authorities cannot help them.

exploited by the military and other opportunists.54 Even during peacetime, children from poor, often rural areas are shipped to work as prostitutes in the more affluent cities, such as Douala, Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Libreville, and Abidjan.

Children at Work in War Zones Human rights organizations estimate that over 40 percent of the global child soldier problem is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. An estimated 120,000 of 300,000 children worldwide fight in armed conflicts in Angola, Burundi, Congo-Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and Uganda.55 Some children are recruited, others are abducted, and yet more are recruited once their caretakers have been abducted or their family structure has broken down. Sub-Saharan African children work in war zones as soldiers, and additionally as support for soldiers in such jobs as minesweepers, spies, messengers, guards, porters, wives, and sex slaves. Governments and rebel groups recruit children to fight because they are malleable, cheap to keep, and easy to dispose. Children are more naive than adults and therefore are

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not likely to recognize the full danger of combat and can be quite fearless. In the case of conflict in Liberia in the late 1990s, children were drugged and told that their opponents’ bullets would not pierce them. Reports from Burundi, on the other hand, note that child soldiers, whether from the rebel or government forces, are offered little training and die in higher numbers on the battlefield compared with adults.56

Overview of African Conflicts Liberia’s citizens suffered seven years of brutal civil war until 1996, when presidential elections brought Charles Taylor to power. Children were orphaned by this fighting, but also were recruited or forced to fight alongside and serve adult soldiers. Taylor was democratically elected in 1996, but many people reported that they were voting for peace in an absence of true choice, because his military forces would have continued to terrorize the population had they not voted for him. In any case, he retained control over most of Liberia from 1996 until 2003. Any civil political opposition had been squelched, and Taylor’s personal income in 2002 was more than that of the entire country. At the same time, Taylor’s government sold diamonds and supported the rebel insurgency in neighboring Sierra Leone, and had been slow to rebuild the social and economic structure of his war-torn country. Given Taylor’s support of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel insurgency in Sierra Leone, in 2001 the UN imposed sanctions on his diamond selling, an arms embargo, and a travel ban on government officials. Since 2001, Liberia has been implicated in selling diamonds to the Al-Qaida terrorist network. Surely this is a recipe for future conflict and hardship for the people of Liberia. In Sierra Leone, the government, led by Ahmed Tejan Kabbah since the 1996 election, engaged in a civil war with the RUF rebel movement from 1991 through 2001. Much like in Liberia, children in Sierra Leone have been involved on both sides and in every aspect of the civil war. The RUF soldiers’ monetary lifeline was curtailed somewhat by the 2001 UN sanctions against Taylor’s government. The government of Sierra Leone is slowly reasserting its authority throughout the country, even though pockets of instability remain, especially in areas when diamond mines exist adjacent to people living in abject poverty. Altogether, tens of thousands of deaths have occurred and about 2 million people (more than one-third of the population) have been displaced. Many of these people are refugees in neighboring countries such as Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire. Demobilization and disarmament of the soldiers have been completed with help from the UN and international development agencies. A civil society with governmental rule of law is gingerly trying to assert itself. As this horrific conflict becomes history, those with severed limbs and psychological scars remain as a reminder of the brutality of war.

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A twenty-year civil war continues in Sudan and has resulted in more than 2 million deaths and 4 million displaced people, which is substantial given an estimated total population of 37 million in 2002. Military dictatorships favoring Islamic beliefs have dominated national politics since independence in 1956, and civil war has consumed all but ten years (1972– 1982) of Sudan’s postcolonial history. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is the main insurgency force, but there are others. In this war, Arab/Muslim governmental forces from the north, supported by Khartoum, fight against non-Muslim rebels in the south of the country. This conflict has more than two sides, because since 1989 a few northern Muslim groups have found shared interests with the southern rebels and have entered the war as a part of an antigovernment alliance. Soldiers pillage towns and abduct women and children. Many children have been enslaved or forced to join warring groups. Credible sources also report that government and associated forces often abduct children for forced labor and soldiering. The Sudanese government has provided support and protection to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group that is responsible for abducting and enslaving thousands of Ugandan children.57 Uganda is a one-party, nondemocratic republic with a nonelected leader and limited representation of its citizens. Officially, Uganda allows just one political group, the National Resistance Movement, which is chaired by President Yoweri Museveni and claims to have the loyalty of all Ugandans. The popular support for Museveni’s leadership probably stops somewhere in the reaches of his own imagination. The LRA rebel movement has a strong presence in the north of Uganda along its border with Sudan. The LRA has abducted an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 children from seemingly safe places such as schools, communities, and homes and transferred them to holding camps in Sudan.58 These children are forced to commit atrocities, provide support labor for soldiers, and become wives and sexual slaves. Credible reports indicate that if children try to escape, become ill, or cannot keep up with the LRA when it is in transit, they are summarily shot. An agreement to cease support of rebel groups and to return abducted people was signed in Nairobi, Kenya, in July 2002, but this agreement has not translated into practice on the ground. Meanwhile, in the south of Uganda, government forces have recruited children into militias that have backed the civil war embroiling its western neighbor, the Democratic Republic of Congo, off and on since the 1990s. Uganda joined forces with Rwanda and rebel groups in the DRC in order to oust Laurent Kabila. In 1997, rebels commanded by Laurent Kabila ousted the military dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Once in power, Ugandan and Rwandan armed forces, which both had recruited children into soldiering, joined eastern Congolese rebels in conflict designed to oust Kabila and establish the mineral-rich eastern provinces as autonomous. To this end, Kabila spent

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considerable mineral wealth trying to stay in power. In the late 1990s, the DRC was the third largest exporter of diamonds. Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia then joined the war, in support of the DRC government, in exchange for lucrative mining concessions. Chad and Sudan intervened to a lesser extent to aid Kabila’s regime. Kabila was assassinated in 2001, and his son, Joseph Kabila, assumed the presidency. Sporadic fighting has continued to plague the economic and political stability in the DRC. Congolese children have been orphaned by the conflict, a problem compounded by the AIDS pandemic, and those left to fend for themselves are easily manipulated into forced work in mines or with rebel groups.59 The government of Rwanda has recruited children to serve in its armed forces alongside militias it has backed in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as in Burundi, and still struggles with its past ethnic disparity. Majority Hutus and minority Tutsis have struggled since the Belgians left at independence in 1959. The descendants of Tutsi exiles formed a rebel group and began a civil war in 1990. This war created economic and political instability and aggravated ethnic tensions. In 1994, an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed as a result of ethnic tensions. Of the total killed, 300,000 were children, most of whom had died at the hands of other children. The Tutsi rebels defeated the Hutu regime and ended the killing in three months’ time. Fearing retribution, roughly 2 million Hutu refugees fled to the neighboring countries of the DRC (then Zaire), Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda. These Hutu refugees provided a breeding ground for instability in the DRC in the late 1990s. Most refugees have now returned to Rwanda, but some children were separated from families along the way. Still, a nagging Hutu extremist insurgency waits in the wings and is a recipe for future instability. Burundi has been plagued by civil conflict since 1993, when its first democratically elected president was assassinated after four months in office. However, a new government established in 2001 plans to hold national elections. Meanwhile, Burundi’s citizens and the world wait. Sustainable peace has not been possible because Hutu rebels are unwilling to accept the cease-fire plans from the government in Bujumbura, which must perform a very delicate balance act of shifting Tutsi and Hutu figureheads. Since 1993, ethnic violence has led to the killing of roughly 200,000 people, and several hundred thousand more have been internally displaced or forced to seek refuge in neighboring countries. Burundi intervened in the civil war in the DRC in the late 1990s, and continues to squelch internal rebel activity. Credible reports suggest that Burundi’s militias have recruited the country’s own children as well as Kenyan street children to fight and provide forced labor and sex.60 Finally, Angola is hopefully shifting off the war radar screen. Namibian children were reportedly recruited by Angolan forces along the

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border with the Democratic Republic of Congo in the late 1990s. Angola has seen civil war off and on since independence from Portugal in 1975. Jonas Savimbi led the main rebel group, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), but he died in 2002 and the rebel group agreed to a cease-fire agreement in exchange for food, seeds, and farm tools. In Malange province, one demobilization camp recently closed, leading to the withdrawal of 1,400 former UNITA soldiers and their 6,700 family members. Each demobilized soldier was supposed to receive a reestablishment kit consisting of fifty kilograms of rice, twenty kilograms of maize, twenty-five kilograms of beans, five kilograms of salt, five liters of cooking oil, and cash equivalent of U.S.$100.61 Demobilized soldiers are less than happy that they are still waiting for farm implements, which could prove destabilizing in the future as they see large oil and diamond revenue not being used to provide for starving people. The elites in Luanda live a fortresslike existence. Civil war has killed roughly 1.5 million people, and women and children have been hardest hit. The UN estimates that 60 percent of Angolan children die before age five. Of those who survive, less than half receive any form of schooling. In all of these cases of civil conflict, children have been affected either through the loss of a parent or through recruitment, often forced, into the work of war. Many children who participate in war efforts do not identify with a higher ideological theory, but are just trying to sustain themselves. For example, a majority of demobilized girls in Liberia who worked with the RUF insurgency in Sierra Leone revealed that they do not understand what the fighting was all about.62 For them, many of whom were forced to serve, they were just getting by.

Families Torn Apart, Children Left Behind When families are ripped apart by war, children are increasingly left behind to fend for themselves. In sub-Saharan Africa, the extended kinship ties provide more support than would be available in other societies, but even this breaks down with continued upheaval. With civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the late 1990s, the number of street children increased. In Bukavu, one of the major easternmost cities of the DRC, children work and beg on the streets, living independently of adult relatives. The DRC suffers from years of civil conflict coupled with the increasingly prevalent AIDS pandemic. According to local custom, extended families in rural areas have provided a wide network of support to distant relatives down on their luck. However, this extended-family structure has been torn apart as the result of the protracted conflict in the DRC. One human rights group has labeled this as “social disarticulation.”63 A typical street boy, Hugo, came from his village to Bukavu after his

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mother died. He worked and begged his way on the streets until he was recruited by the Congolese Rally for Democracy, a rebel group in the eastern part of the country, when he was fourteen years old. The soldiers forced him to do menial tasks, including the laundry. “One day, a military chief made me wash his clothes, and someone stole the clothes, and I got whipped and they took me to jail.”64 Hugo tries to earn his way by living, working, and begging on the street. He fits into several categories of vulnerability, as he is alone, a street worker, a demobilized support worker of the war effort, and probably an AIDS orphan. He is one of the increasing numbers of children on the streets of urban areas without family connections. He spends his days with other children with similar backgrounds. In addition to the calamities that have befallen Hugo, other children have suffered imprisonment, prostitution, accusations of sorcery, the effects of demobilization from soldiering, and, in the case of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi, separation from their repatriated families. Like Hugo, most children fit into more than one category of vulnerability.65

Orphaned, Recruited, or Just Snatched in the Sahel The abduction of individuals and communities in conflict-torn societies such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Sudan has been common, leaving in its wake an epidemic of orphaned children. Some of these children are abducted themselves, and many others are recruited as child soldiers or forced to provide support to the war effort: Thirteen-year-old Peter from Sudan provides a typical example, for he joined the SPLA . . . rebel group after his parents were killed, and his brothers and sisters were taken as slaves in a raid by soldiers from the north. Peter became a sergeant in the SPLA rebel forces, and eventually became recognized for his fighting skills. Peter explains, “When I found that when my father was killed I had no choice and I am confident to kill anybody that are among the enemy because there is no alternative anyway. They have shown me that killing a person is not a crime, not a bad thing.”66 Another Sudanese boy, Peter Acolio, now 16 years old, reports being recruited into the SPLA when he was 10 years old. He was only seven years old when he saw his father shot and killed by government troops. He went into battle for the first time at age 13.67 A boy from Sierra Leone explains that he became a soldier after his mother was hit by a stray bullet when he was 12 years old as they both tried to reach Guinea. The boy was then abducted by RUF soldiers near the border with Guinea. He fought with the

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RUF, but never became a good fighter. His superiors nicknamed him, “Someday good, someday bad.” Other children became adept at maiming and raping and were rewarded for their exploits.68 Like many child soldiers, these boys are orphans. They joined the army because they had nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep, and no one to care for them. For children in the SPLA rebel movement in Sudan, younger boys were expected to collect water and firewood for the soldiers, and older boys were trained to fight. In the RUF rebel movement, younger boys who could not fire a gun yet were forced into supportive labor. For girls who are abducted, they most often face the fate of overlapping forced labor, forced sex, and forced marriage. Upon being snatched, girls are generally raped or assigned to be the wife of a rebel commander. The assignment ceremony is considered to be a marriage by the rebels, yet is nothing more than enslavement: “One girl, Charlotte, was one of 30 girls abducted in 1996 from her Catholic boarding school in a northern Ugandan town by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Once she was abducted, she was given to an LRA rebel commander to serve as his wife and servant. She is forced to become his sexual partner. Charlotte has given birth to two children, and is still held by the LRA today.”69 Many children, especially those who are orphaned or living away from families, find themselves in forced labor as a result of civil war. Many children from northern Uganda find themselves in forced labor situations in southern Sudan serving soldiers. They are forced to work under the threat of violence or punishment.

Abducted from “Safe” Places Children are often abducted from seemingly safe places such as orphanages, boarding schools, homes, and their communities. Much like the thirty girls abducted from their boarding school in northern Uganda in 1996, boys in Burundi faced a similar fate in 2001.70 The Forces for the Defense of Democracy continued to abduct children in Burundi even after the ceasefire agreement was signed in late 2001.71 The forces entered the Musema School in a rural area at gunpoint, demanded money from the students and staff, and then marched the students off to become forced recruits in their rebel group. 72 In this particular case, a few of the forced recruits did escape. If children are caught trying to escape, they are typically subjected to beatings or in some cases shot. In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army raids schools and orphanages as a matter of course. An estimated 6,000 to 8,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA, and credible reports suggest that all of these children are forced to work as soldiers and household servants, in agriculture and herding, or for sex.73 Those who fight in the LRA are then pitted against the

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Ugandan army. Abducted children are subjected to a regime of extreme and arbitrary violence. If they are caught trying to escape, they are killed or tortured. A credible report indicates that in October 1996, girls were caned fifteen times and then ordered to kill another girl who had tried to escape.74 Some children who have fled this servitude have been captured by the Sudanese army, which supports the LRA effort, and returned to the LRA. In practice, abducted children are effectively the property of LRA commanders. Girls generally are forced to enter the domestic track of household and sex work, where they are allocated to soldiers as rewards and incentives. Boys typically are taught to fight and are pitted against the Ugandan army. The LRA tries to steel children for battle by forcing children to take part in ritualized killing of other children. Credible reports indicate that in August 1996, three boys were ordered to kill another child with an axe.75

Forced into Servitude and Sex Adult soldiers are known to rape both boy and girl recruits, but girls are at a heightened risk for rape and sexual slavery. In addition to being taken as “wives,” girls are also used as soldiers in Angola, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. In fact, “one of the taboo subjects in Sudan is the extent of sexual abuse of boy captives by soldiers.”76 A Ugandan girl who was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army and taken to camps in Sudan recounts her experience: “We were distributed to men and I was given to a man who had just killed his woman.”77 In northern Uganda, Human Rights Watch interviewed girls who had been impregnated by rebel commanders, forced to strap their babies onto their backs, and take up arms against Ugandan security forces.78 The fate of girls abducted during war fits into several categories of forced work, but the most damaging is that of forced sex and marriage. During the course of just one year, from the summer of 2001 to the summer of 2002, UNICEF demobilized more than 4,200 child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Of these children, about 340 girls, or 8 percent, had been forced into domestic and sex work, most often as the wife of a rebel commander.79 It is especially difficult for these girls to return to their prewar lives, because many of them now have children with these men and are financially dependent.

Easily Manipulated and Forced to Fight Children are often easy to manipulate. One commander involved in fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo notes, “[Children] make good fighters because they’re young and want to show off. They think it’s a game, so they’re fearless.”80 During the hundred days of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, over 300,000 children were hacked to death, mostly at the hands of

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other children wielding machetes and knives. 81 In Rwanda, children recruited by rebel soldiers were manipulated by misinformation. One thirteen-year-old boy and former rebel soldier, Twizeyimana, explained, “We were told by our commanders that if you are captured, the ‘cockroaches’ kill you instantly.”82 These children believed that they had to fight in order to avoid being killed. Children have been heavily recruited as a result of the Rwandan genocide and ensuing civil war. The Rwandan army, its rebel allies, and other militia groups operating in the DRC have actively recruited child soldiers.83 Children are easily trained and taught what is “appropriate” behavior. When children become soldiers, appropriate behavior sinks to new lows. For example, when several hundred Liberian government soldiers, many of whom were children, retook an iron-mining town from a four-year-old rebel movement, they left ten mutilated bodies as trophies to deteriorate at the town’s outskirts and then paraded through town chanting slogans such as, “Anybody who says no more Taylor, we will kill you like a dog.”84 Children are also forced to fight against their will or, if they refuse, face being killed as a consequence by their superior commanders. For many of these children, it is therefore kill or be killed. Children participate in all aspects of the war effort. They may be on the front lines of combat with an AK-47 or an M-16. They may also serve as human mine detectors and participate in suicide missions. Additionally, on the battlefield, children carry supplies, act as spies or messengers, and serve as sentries. Because children are physically vulnerable and easily intimidated by their adult superiors, they typically make for obedient soldiers. In some cases, child soldiers are given drugs to imbue them with a sense of fearlessness. A fourteen-year-old rebel soldier in Sierra Leone said that those who refused the drugs were killed.85 One young man recounts how he was forced to fight in Ethiopia in 1999 when he was fifteen years old. Mohammed, now seventeen, recalls, “It was very bad. They put all the 15- and 16-year-olds in the front line while the army retreated. I was with 40 other kids. I was fighting for 24 hours. When I saw that only three of my friends were alive, I ran back.”86 Ethiopian students and other teenage boys are sent to six main camps, where they must undertake six months of military training and political indoctrination before being sent to the front. At the front, child soldiers are marched over minefields onto the Eritrean trenches to clear a path for the regular standing army. Child soldiers become easier to manage the farther they are removed from their homes.87

Demobilizing Child Soldiers When the fighting abates, the question remains whether these children who served as soldiers, or as support workers for soldiers, can become reinte-

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grated into civil society. Some children are orphaned. Other children cannot find their parents even if they may be alive, especially if they have been off fighting in another country for years. Many of these children have experienced and even committed horrendous atrocities, some of which have been inflicted on their own community, and some who find their families are summarily rejected. While some may have been softened through their experiences, others have been hardened. Children from Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and Sierra Leone have begun to be demobilized. Faced with few alternatives, many children in Sierra Leone volunteered to fight in order to eat. Commanders used drugs to numb child soldiers for battle, and some commanders forced children to carry out atrocities against their neighbors. Fourteen-year-old Alhaji was kidnapped by RUF rebels in Sierra Leone when he was ten years old. Before being trained to fire an assault rifle, he was subjected to beatings. He then performed his role as an RUF soldier for the next two and a half years. Alhaji began his reintegration process in 2000, when UN peacekeeping forces secured his release from his RUF commander. In the postwar environment, Alhaji’s family has not accepted him back. He explains, “With family members, I have faced a lot of distrust. Some doubt whether I will ever be a ‘normal child’ again. I did bad things in the bush and I saw very bad things done to both children and adults.”88 Girls also fought as soldiers and served as domestic and sex slaves. One fourteen-year-old girl who was abducted in January 1999 by the RUF rebel group in Sierra Leone describes her war experience: “I’ve seen people get their hands cut off, a ten-year-old girl raped and then die, and so many men and women burned alive . . . so many times I just cried inside my heart because I didn’t dare cry out loud.”89 Rather than becoming hardened by her war experience and her inability to control the events around her, she seems softened. Likewise, a former child soldier who is now learning the auto mechanic trade tries to find fresh opportunity after much fighting in Sierra Leone. He was abducted and became an RUF soldier at the age of twelve when his mother was killed in the crossfire. He explains, “After I saw how my mother was killed, I had sympathy for others. I never believed in the RUF.”90 Similarly in northern Uganda, children abducted by the LRA to do the work of war have found it difficult to become reintegrated into their families and communities. Many children have experienced considerable hardship. One former Sudanese child soldier, Daniel, recounts a battle scene: “I was stepping on spent cartridges on the ground, and they were so hot that my feet got burnt. I didn’t notice at the time, but I couldn’t sleep that night because my feet were so burnt.”91 Even when these children are freed or happen to escape, they continue to suffer because they are haunted by their war memories as they try to rebuild their broken families and lives.92

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Case in Point 7.2 Sierra Leone and Liberia Demobilized child soldiers and their futures

In Sierra Leone, most child soldiers have now been demobilized. Both government and rebel groups used children to fight during the civil war during the 1990s. The UN estimates that, from 1991 to 1999, government and rebel forces in Sierra Leone recruited between 5,000 and 10,000 children to serve in the civil war. However, this estimate seems low given that many children died or are missing. In 2001 alone, more than 4,200 child soldiers were demobilized, and yet 1,200 children remain missing from one attack in January 1999 on the Freetown area. Children were abducted and recruited all over the country.93 The children who are now being demobilized carry vicious war memories but are committed to moving on. Among the children demobilized in 2001, about 8 percent were girls forced to be domestic workers, prostitutes to soldiers, or wives to commanders.94 During the war, RUF rebels especially were known to make forays into the bush to rape and abduct young girls who sought refuge there. The RUF rebels kidnapped both young boys and young girls to augment their forces. Some children committed crimes or were forced to murder members of their own family, and have been rejected by their communities because of their perceived involvement in rebel activities.95 International development organizations and charities are working to make the transition easier for these children. Demobilized children are typically held in temporary care centers before being released. When they are released, their families typically are given continues

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Case in Point 7.2 continued money. Some children have no family to return to, so they stay in centers longer and try to make a transition to independent living. Many demobilized children receive start-up kits for undertaking a trade or paid placement in a school. International donations have paid for these programs, and some children have managed to make the adjustment and to persevere with their training and formal schooling plans. Many children, though, have slipped through the cracks by dropping out of the program and selling their kits, which include hardware like sewing machines and tools. One girl who was kidnapped when she was thirteen during the “Spare No Living Thing” invasion of Freetown in January 1999, became the wife of one Liberian RUF commander and then another, passed along like a war trophy. When in 2001 she heard that her older sister was still alive and living in Freetown, she fled without her belongings and was allowed to attend school as part of the demobilization effort. She recently was ranked eighth in a class of thirtynine students and has plans for a prosperous future with what is left of her family. “I want to continue my studying and become an accountant.”96 One boy who was fourteen years old when forced to begin fighting with the RUF rebel group was nicknamed “Poison” by his commanders because of his skills. He took part in the notorious January 1999 slaughter of Freetown in which thousands of civilians were killed, raped, or had their limbs severed. He recalls, “I was ordered to kill by my commander.”97 As part of the demobilization effort, this boy works as an apprentice to a mechanic. He has been working for eight months and is trying to create a peaceful future, which will hopefully stand in contrast to his tragic, brutal childhood. Additionally, plastic surgeons sponsored by international agencies have been commissioned to remove the “RUF” markings that were carved on children’s chests by commanders of the rebel movement.98 This may seem cosmetic, but it liberates these children and makes them less of a target for discrimination. They need every advantage, as they are being integrated into a country that offers little opportunity to its children. Sierra Leone ranks as one of the worst places in the world to be a child, according to almost every social and human development indicator. As discussed in Chapter 3, voluntary labor is an improvement for these demobilized children who were forced or recruited to do the work of civil war in the 1990s. They are very optimistic about the future and see voluntary work as an opportunity. Perhaps the greatest testament to their childhood is their optimism for the future after such a brutal past.

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Taking Responsibility for Child Soldiers UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan argues that the use of child soldiers must be “recognized as intolerable.”99 However, children continue to be used in conflicts despite the efforts of nongovernmental organizations and the statements by African governments and international leaders that recruitment would stop. Indeed, the international community has been successful at developing and elaborating norms, standards, and rules against the use of child soldiers, but their application has been less than passable. Words on paper have not protected children from war in many countries. In African conflicts during the past decade, children have played a substantial role, blurring the distinctions between soldier and civilian, and adult and child. Some governments outright lie and deny that children are working as soldiers within their borders. For example, Yemane Kidane, from Ethiopia’s foreign affairs ministry, denies any wrongdoing and points the finger of blame at Eritrea, a neighboring country involved in a border dispute with Ethiopia: “There are no child soldiers in Ethiopia. This report is just disseminating Eritrean propaganda. . . . It is in fact Eritrea that took children and students from schools and colleges and placed them in the trenches.”100 Comments like these highlight the difficulty of determining the exact nature of the problem, where much of the evidence is anecdotal and can be confused with propaganda. Most African countries set the legal minimum at age eighteen for soldiers, but this is always negotiable, especially in times of civil unrest. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army said it would stop recruiting soldiers under eighteen years old in 2000, but this proclamation has not translated into practice.101 Likewise, Sudan’s ambassador to the United States has maintained that there is no problem with the abduction of children in war zones: “There are no slaves . . . there is a vicious portrayal about Sudan.”102 Yet all witnesses interviewed implicated the government in sponsoring and supporting the slave raids. Even the often understated U.S. State Department’s human rights report notes for Sudan: “All the reports and information received indicates the direct and general involvement of the SPAF (army), the PDF (militia) . . . and mujahidin groups backed by the government in the abduction and deportation of civilians from the conflict zones to the north.”103 Most of those captured are taken from rebel territory to government-controlled areas. The Arab militia is commanded and armed, but not paid, by the Sudanese government. Arab militia officers are allowed to keep whatever is seized in the village raids, which often includes men, women, and children.104

Prostitution and Sex Work While substantial numbers of prostitutes exist because of the trafficking of children, the misleading of children, and forced abductions in war, these

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groups do not represent all children who engage in prostitution or sex work. Some children are orphaned, and other children come from such poor families that they may as well be orphaned, because the family unit cannot provide for the basic needs of the child. Again, a breakdown of family structure and productivity provides the ingredients for exploitative work for children, especially girls. There are an estimated 800 child prostitutes in Arusha, Dar es Salaam, and Singida, Tanzania.105 Some of these girls find themselves in prostitution after being trafficked as domestic workers first. There are some reports in Tanzania that rural parents encourage their daughters into prostitution in order to finance their brothers’ bridewealth obligations or to send money to support poor families in rural areas. Increasingly, children who are orphaned by AIDS and not taken in by extended family members are vulnerable to recruitment into prostitution. The case of Gaudensia, orphaned three years ago, is typical of a child prostitute in Tanzania: When 16-year-old Gaudensia lost her mother three years ago, her life became more problematic and she eventually turned to prostitution in order to survive. Initially, she lodged with an aunt, but her uncle began to sexually abuse her. She began as a barmaid at a club, but her salary was not sufficient to cover her daily needs. She tried prostitution to increase her income level. She now sees clients from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. and works in a petty vending business during the day. She has been arrested several times, and has had sex in order to be released in lieu of money. She has been diagnosed as HIV-positive for four months, yet her clients still refuse to use condoms.106 A study of child labor in Kenyan tourism found both girls and boys involved in sex work. The average working age of children was twelve. A fourteen-year-old boy from Mombassa working in prostitution stated, “Many people know what kind of work I do and they just despise me. I get uneasy when I think about how people must talk about me.”107 In western Africa, conflict has wreaked havoc on the family structures. Many families who have fled to refugee camps maintained by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees have found protection from fighting but have been pressured to sell their children into the sex trade. A study based on interviews with 1,500 refugees in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea published in early 2002 reported that aid workers administering these refugee camps pressured adult and child refugees to have sex in exchange for basic food and favors.108 Refugees reported that they felt compelled to offer their children to aid workers for sex in order to survive. UN peacekeepers were also involved in extracting sex for services from this extremely vulnerable population.109

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Conclusion This chapter has touched on the most exploitative forms of child labor, including various forms of slavery, forced labor, recruited labor in the context of abject poverty, and exploitation. Mbay Dionne, the Islamic studentbeggar child discussed at length in Chapter 2, represents yet another form of exploitative labor often associated with poverty. Again, much of this poverty emanates from rural areas and spills over into urban areas. While poverty stands out as a prerequisite for the most exploitative types of child labor, most of these children have been separated from their parents, as for those who have been orphaned, abducted, trafficked, or sent to live with distant kin or nonkin relations. Some of these children have seen their families dissolve in the context of civil war, disease, political upheaval, or abject poverty. In cases of war, children are both forced and recruited to serve in supportive or soldiering roles in the war effort when their parents have been killed, because many of them must secure their next meal and a safe place to sleep. In politically stable situations, abject poverty figures prominently into the child labor equation. While well-dressed recruiters may dupe some rural parents, there are others who are so strapped by poverty that they sell their children into forced labor situations in western Africa or encourage their daughters to engage in prostitution in eastern Africa. Some children are enslaved alongside their parents. Other children have been enslaved as a result of civil war, such as in Sudan or Sierra Leone, generally alongside a mother who becomes someone else’s wife or sex slave. Other children have been enslaved through tradition, such as in Mauritania or Niger, and they may remain enslaved even where prohibited by law. Their parents remain economically and psychologically dependent on their former masters. Religion is a factor for some of the most exploitative forms of child labor, such as the Trokosi girls or the religious beggar boys. In both instances, it is because of poverty that families are compelled to entrust their children with religious leaders. In the case of the Trokosi girls, the institution evolved because rural people could no longer afford to atone for their sins with payments of cattle. In the case of the religious beggar boys, they are recruited among the poorest rural families in western Africa and taken to urban areas for their religious training and begging work. There are well-intentioned laws on the books protecting children, but there is still a real gap between theory and practice. For example, Article 32 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) stated, “State parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely [to be] hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.” In an overwhelming majority of cases worldwide, the “intolerable” forms

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of child labor are already illegal, yet little is done to enforce the law.110 In some cases, there is political turmoil and it is difficult for the government to intercede on behalf of children. The linchpin for international intervention in the most exploitative forms of child labor seems to be some material connection to the child. Occasionally, the world is spurred to action by CNN or BBC images, but when the chocolate bar or cocoa that one buys and eats in Nice or Oxford or Kansas City can be associated with exploitative labor, a more immediate pressure can arise to do away with the forced labor, trafficking, and slavery of children. It is not just the labor relations or the work conditions that determine whether a particular case of child labor becomes an issue, but whether a connection can be made between the lives of working children in African countries to the daily lives of people in richer countries. The worst forms of child labor involve work that is hazardous and puts children at risk. During the summer of 2002, 300 experts from fifty countries took part in an international conference in the Netherlands to define the term “hazardous work.” 111 Interestingly, hazardous child labor is already banned under international law through several UN conventions and countless laws at the national level. Still, most legislation continues to ring hollow because the underlying reasons for children’s participation in the most hazardous forms of labor—abject poverty, persistent inequalities, and family dissolution—have not been addressed. Legislation could be a powerful instrument, but only if it is coupled with real alternatives and economic improvement in the daily lives of working children and their families.

Notes 1. Anti-Slavery International, “West Africa’s Trafficked Children.” 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Reuters, “President.” 5. New York Times (Onishi), “The Bondage of Poverty.” 6. Reuters, “President.” 7. Mbaye and Fall, “The Disintegrating Social Fabric.” 8. International Labour Organization (ILO), International Program on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), and Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labour (SIMPOC), Every Child Counts. 9. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), “African Children Enslaved in UK.” 10. BBC (Barou), “Rescued Niger Slaves ‘Tortured.’” 11. Shosh, Candidates Urged. 12. Ibid. 13. Woods, “The Slave Girls of Ghana.” 14. Bales, Disposable People.

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15. BBC (Barou), “Rescued Niger Slaves ‘Tortured.’” 16. Ibid. 17. Verney, Slavery in Sudan. 18. New York Times (Kristof), “A Slave’s Journey in Sudan.” 19. Verney, Slavery in Sudan, p. 3. 20. Baltimore Sun (Lewthwaite and Kane), “Witness to Slavery,” p. 1. 21. Shosh, Candidates Urged. 22. Anti-Slavery International, Visit to Mauritania. 23. Woods, “The Slave Girls of Ghana.” 24. BBC (Hawksley), “Ghana’s Trapped Slaves,” p. 1. 25. Bales, Disposable People, p. 13. 26. Kielland, “Child Labor Migration.” 27. See Cable News Network (CNN) (Stephens), “Child Slavery.” 28. Ibid. 29. Kielland, “Child Labor Migration.” 30. Ibid., p. 7. 31. Ibid. 32. Anti-Slavery International, “West Africa’s Trafficked Children.” 33. Anti-Slavery International, “Child Domestic Workers.” 34. Anti-Slavery International, “Trafficking of Children.” The research uses the interviews together with a survey commissioned from Enfants Solidaires d’Afrique et du Monde (ESAM), a nongovernmental organization in Benin. 35. Anti-Slavery International, “Trafficking of Children.” 36. See ibid. 37. Ebigbo, Child Trafficking in Nigeria. 38. CNN (Stephens), “Child Slavery.” 39. BBC, “Ship Children Flown Back to Togo.” 40. New York Times (Onishi), “The Bondage of Poverty.” 41. Ottawa Citizen (Shahin), “Chocolate’s Bitter Legacy.” 42. New York Times (Onishi), “The Bondage of Poverty.” 43. Ibid. 44. The Guardian (Jeffery and Stafford), “Slavery,” p. 1. 45. Ibid. 46. Ottawa Citizen (Shahin), “Chocolate’s Bitter Legacy.” 47. New York Times (Reuters), “Guinean Police.” 48. BBC, “Nigeria Urges Return of Seized Girls.” 49. BBC (Monekosso), “Africa’s Trade in Children.” 50. CNN (Stephens), “Child Slavery.” 51. Kielland, “Child Labor Migration.” 52. New York Times, “Child Slave Trade.” 53. Ibid., p. 12. 54. Ibid. 55. Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, Global Report. 56. New York Times (Lacey), “In Burundi Schools.” 57. U.S. Department of State, 1999 Country Reports. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. New York Times (Lacey), “In Burundi Schools.” 61. Action for Southern Africa, Angolan Peace Monitor. 62. U.S. Department of State, 1999 Country Reports. 63. Edgerton, “The Street Children of Bukavu.”

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64. Ibid., p. 2. 65. Ibid. 66. BBC (Loyn), “Rehabilitating Sudan’s Boy Soldiers.” 67. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “Children Still Used as Soldiers.” 68. Ibid., p. 1. 69. New York Times (Lacey), “Sudan.” 70. New York Times (Lacey), “In Burundi Schools.” 71. The Defense of Democracy rebel group and the National Liberation Forces had not been party to the peace deal. 72. New York Times (Lacey), “In Burundi Schools.” 73. BBC, “End Psychotic War on Children.” 74. Amnesty International, “Uganda.” 75. Ibid. 76. See Nafir: The Newsletter of Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad 1, no. 3 (1996). 77. BBC, “Report Decries Use of Children.” 78. Human Rights Watch, Child Soldiers Campaign. 79. New York Times (Onishi), “Children of War in Sierra Leone.” 80. BBC, “Report Decries Use of Children.” 81. BBC, “Rwandan Child Soldiers Stage Emotional Homecoming.” 82. Ibid. 83. Anti-Slavery International, Forced Labour in the Twenty-First Century. 84. New York Times, “Liberian Government Retakes Key Town.” 85. BBC, “Report Decries Use of Children.” 86. Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, Global Report. 87. BBC, “Report Decries Use of Children.” 88. BBC, “Child Soldier Asks UN for Help.” 89. Human Rights Watch, Child Soldiers Campaign. 90. BBC, “Child Soldier Asks UN for Help.” 91. BBC (Loyn), “Rehabilitating Sudan’s Boy Soldiers.” 92. Amnesty International, “Uganda.” 93. U.S. Department of State, 1999 Country Reports. 94. New York Times (Onishi), “Children of War in Sierra Leone.” 95. U.S. Department of State, 1999 Country Reports. 96. New York Times (Onishi), “Children of War in Sierra Leone.” 97. Ibid. 98. BBC, “Plastic Surgeons to Help.” 99. New York Times (Onishi), “Children of War in Sierra Leone.” 100. BBC, “Report Decries Use of Children.” 101. Ibid. 102. Baltimore Sun (Lewthwaite and Kane), “Witness to Slavery.” 103. See ibid. 104. U.S. Department of State, 1994 Country Reports on Human Rights. 105. Kamala et al., Tanzania Children in Prostitution. 106. Ibid. 107. ILO, Child Labor in Tourism. 108. BBC, “Child Refugee Sex Scandal.” 109. Ibid. 110. Anti-Slavery International, “Non-Governmental Organizations Urge Action.” 111. BBC (Coughlan), “Child Labour Conference.”

8 Making Sense of Child Labor in Africa

Children are the reward of life.1 Human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their first proclamation.2 Mankind owes to the child the best that it has to give.3 Childhood is not an objective, natural category. Rather, the meaning of childhood is subjective, a product of particular cultures and social structures. Thus, our essentially sentimental vision of childhood reflects relatively recent historical developments in Western society.4 This book has provided a great deal of data to explain why children in subSaharan Africa work in both rural and urban settings and how it is that children are incorporated into different types of work. The “Cases in Point” sprinkled throughout the book show the complexity of child labor situations in specific countries. The highest rates of child labor worldwide are found in sub-Saharan Africa, and these rates will likely result in stifled economic growth and a continued unequal development trajectory for the continent. Chapter 2 considered the relationship between several types of child labor in sub-Saharan Africa today and specific cultures and historical epochs. The legacies from sub-Saharan Africa’s triple heritage—of indigenous, Islamic, and colonial cultures—inform our understanding of the different forms of child labor present in Africa today, but the postcolonial context has much to offer as an explanatory tool. In the end, historical eras provide limited explanations for certain types of child labor that are present in sub-Saharan Africa today, and on the whole postcolonial influences such

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as political instability, compromised and corrupt politicians, and unequal investment in urban over rural areas remain more salient in explaining children’s opportunities. Chapter 3 examined political economic explanations of children’s labor, some of which were suggested by the examination of the postcolonial context in Chapter 2. Large debt service payments and structural adjustment policies have adversely affected the economic well-being of families and thus their ability to provide for their children in sub-Saharan Africa. Families, especially those in rural areas, have been left behind economically and educationally, creating more impetus to have their children work. A weak state, corrupt leaders, and armed conflict have further eroded potential opportunities for African families, but there is some hope that good governance is taking hold, especially as citizens take to the streets and demand that corrupt and unresponsive leaders step down. The AIDS pandemic has killed parents who otherwise would be heading families and providing for children. As the orphan situation proliferates, children forgo early educational inputs in order to work and take care of younger siblings. An examination of international competition in the global market presents itself as an elusive opportunity to elevate the incomes of most African families, because most people do not have the skills to compete in the global economy and international trade laws continue to favor the richer countries and stifle the economic development of poorer countries. Chapter 3 examined how so many child labor laws could be on the books yet remain ineffective in limiting or eliminating this labor. In most cases, these laws do not address the underlying reasons that children enter work or the practicalities of enforcement in the local context. Legislation will do little but make governments appear concerned and responsive unless the underlying issues of poverty, educational opportunity, and rural-urban inequity are addressed in the sub-Saharan context. Chapter 4 examined the value of children from a different angle. Rural and urban parents often define childhood differently, and these different meanings of childhood result in different expectations in formal schooling and work for children patterned across rural and urban areas. The overarching demographic shift of people from rural to urban areas in the postcolonial era has propelled consequent shifts in production from subsistence agriculture to wage work in the cash economy, shifts from lineage-based to couple-centered marriages, and shifts from larger to smaller family forms. In smaller families who earn a living from wage work in the cash economy, the worth of children transitions from production value to nurturing and emotional value. The parental orientation is further shaped by educational infrastructure. Children from families who reside in urban areas generally have access to a more adequate educational system than do children in rural areas. The rural-urban divide and the

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economic divide continue to shape how childhood is viewed in both rural and urban areas. Chapter 5 examined whether there is a fundamental conflict between work and school. Overall, a push from the inadequate and often unaffordable public educational system and a pull to the ever-expanding informal sector labor market coalesce to place many children in full-time work. Across sub-Saharan Africa, structural-level data show that children are much more likely to work in countries with low primary school enrollment rates and low adult literacy rates. These relationships suggest that if one generation of children chose schooling over work, the next generation will do the same. Children’s work is not always perceived as work but as vocational training, as is the case for children who learn the agricultural work of their parents in rural areas or children who undertake apprenticeships in urban areas. While part-time work allows some children to continue with their formal schooling, most full-time work outside the household tends to conflict with formal schooling. There are cases such as the “earn and learn” schools of Zimbabwe in which children are able to meet both formal schooling and full-time work requirements, but these cases are clearly exceptions when considering the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Additional studies show that in most cases, even when children are able to combine work and school, work has a deleterious effect on both educational attainment and academic achievement. Given this relationship, though, finding some middle ground between work and formal schooling, or working as vocational training or working full-time, represents the only way for many children and their families to eat. Chapter 6 considered the value assigned to children’s labor within different work environments in Senegal and then compared these findings with those of other research throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The value of children’s labor is socially constructed because their work is defined as being different than the work of adults and therefore can be viewed as having less productive value. Children’s work often can be remunerated at a lower rate than that of adults because, first, it can be physically separated from adult work even when child and adult work tasks are similar or the same; second, it can be defined based on its vocational training rather than its production value; and third, it can be acknowledged as part of the family’s work, or as a way of fostering or helping a child, rather than work per se. In addition to spatial relations, the mask of vocational training, and the idiom of kinship, other factors such as gender, age, and parents’ social networks and backgrounds coalesce to construct the value of children’s work. Overall, though, societal definitions and expectations structure the value of children’s labor through their nonadult status, and this pattern holds in a cross-cultural comparative analysis. Chapter 7 examined the most exploitative forms of child labor and

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found that most children engaged in these types of labor live in abject poverty and have experienced some form of family dissolution, either through war, sickness, death, divorce, parental subjugation, or parental desertion. While many national and international laws aim to curb hazardous and exploitative forms of child labor, these laws do more to ease the consciences of well-meaning people in richer countries than to better the daily working conditions of children in impoverished countries.

Why and How Do Children Work? Overall, the dominant factor that drives child labor is local poverty. In subSaharan Africa, food sustainability and real incomes have decreased rather than increased despite extensive economic development efforts in the postcolonial era. This is not to say that economic development has not and cannot work in sub-Saharan Africa, but that other factors, such as corrupt leaders, political instability, disingenuous policies that thwart rather than enhance agricultural and industrial development, and unequal investment in education and the economy in rural and urban areas, have blocked the way. Parents send their children to work because the family needs the income and there are few alternative options. While local poverty remains the fundamental reason that children work, children’s labor should be viewed as a labyrinth of mutually reinforcing and interconnected processes, such as rural-urban and global inequalities, social capital, and children’s own input. And again, it is a prism of poverty that allows us to separate the unique consequences for children’s labor situations. Unequal investment in rural and urban areas explains the nuances of poverty and how it affects children’s likelihood of working. Poverty is more pronounced in rural than in urban areas. In fact, most rural children are left out of the opportunity loop entirely, because the rural-urban divide also patterns whether or not parents work for wages in the cash economy, the availability of educational opportunities, the formation of larger and smaller family forms, and different definitions of childhood. Global inequalities in terms of political power and agenda setting also frame the local poverty picture. In the postcolonial era, international lending institutions have favored investment in urban areas to the detriment of rural areas. Much of this investment took the form of loans that resulted in debt to be repaid equally by all rural and urban citizens and an investment opportunity cost to the greater detriment of rural households. Reexaminations by international aid and lending institutions in the late 1990s have begun to result in a questioning of the urban bias that has characterized international investment. These efforts should be extended in order to expand agricultural production and sustainable economic growth in rural areas. Stable sub-Saharan African governments can follow the same

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development model of Asian countries, such as Thailand or South Korea, that have financed industrial economic growth and development by expanding and not neglecting agricultural production. More equitable investment, if administered honestly, can increase incomes for rural families so that they can provide adequately for children. More equitable investment may also provide better short-term educational and long-term earning opportunities for rural-based children. Rather than have children and their families seek the “bright lights of the city,”5 responsible investment could bring the bright lights to the countryside. Social capital also explains how children come to work as their parents negotiate educational and work opportunities for them using the social relationships they can draw on. This is especially true of rural-based families and poor urban families, who often harness their social relationships in order to create training opportunities for their children. Families with limited economic resources are generally not in a powerful bargaining position to reach a work or apprenticeship agreement for their children. In some cases, rural families may owe something to more affluent family members living in urban areas, and securing a child in a work or training relationship strengthens the reciprocity and kinship ties across rural and urban extended families. Modern work relations have expanded this notion of reciprocity, so that rural families allow their children to work in urban areas with nonkin employers. Even so, children often refer to their employers using kinship terms of “uncle” or “aunt,” which masks their work as assisting in a family enterprise. Because work in a family enterprise generally does not violate child labor laws, the idiom of kinship can be used to hide exploitative work relationships. Children who have become disconnected from their families therefore lose the protective benefit of kin-based social relations while the true nature of the child-employer work relationship remains hidden. Some nonkin employers treat children well, but many children in these arrangements have little negotiating power and work long hours for little or no monetary compensation. Also, some children want to earn income to augment their household’s budget and, in some cases, to have pocket money. Children engaged in both rural and urban work across sub-Saharan Africa report that their work is valuable for themselves and their households in terms of buying food and household goods. Interviews conducted with children working in commercial agriculture in Tanzania demonstrate how this work can be beneficial for the child in terms of acquiring spending money and money for the household. Working children in Zimbabwe and Ghana report that they earn income to pay their own school fees or the school fees of younger siblings, which explains why their work is useful and further challenges the idea that children’s work and children’s schooling are contradictory objectives. A disturbing and growing trend is that of children who work because

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their parents are dead, enslaved, or lost due to civil unrest. These children work because they must, or else go hungry. These children enter the labor market with little human capital, social capital, and negotiating power and must fend for themselves and, many times, younger siblings. Their work is negotiated through their compromised status of being children in societies that accord considerable weight to social status based on age. Without adult supervision, they work at the whim of their employers, often in the most exploitative types of labor.

How Does Children’s Work Shape the Definition of Childhood? Any discussion of children’s work or children’s labor should consider the nature of childhood. Whether children work or not and for what purpose allows us to define what it is to be a child. The concept of childhood is bound by culture and time, and by level of economic development. Social structures such as gender, social class, race or ethnicity, and rural-urban background all shape different ideas about what is expected of a child in a particular culture. Additionally, the family shapes children to the extent that they are subordinate members and to the extent that it mediates the societal influences of gender, social class, race or ethnicity, and rural-urban background. During the past 200 years, children in the United States and Europe have become more valued in terms of their need for nurturing rather than their production value or ability to contribute to the family income.6 As discussed in Chapter 4, this same shift began in sub-Saharan African countries precipitously in 1960 along with urbanization and increasing dependence on a cash economy. According to this line of logic, a demographic shift in population from rural to urban areas in turn affects changes in the economy, power dynamics between young adults and their parents, young people’s choices of marital partners, and what these young adults expect of their children once they marry and start a family. Sub-Saharan African families are at different places along the continuum of a changing concept of childhood, depending upon social structural factors. Once a substantial proportion of the total population adjusts its expectations for childhood, a cultural shift occurs for other families even when the demographic and economic instigators are not there. If most people in a given society provide their children with more nurturing in childhood, this idea becomes the new cultural standard for childhood within that society. Children’s work therefore defines childhood because it structures what is expected in the daily life of a child. A working child still experiences a childhood, but it may not resemble a Western ideal of childhood in all

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aspects. In rural areas, nurturing and educational inputs may mean teaching a child the work of the household and subsistence farming. Urban child labor is more problematic to reconcile with nurturing and educational inputs, because there are more educational inputs available in urban areas. A working child in sub-Saharan Africa enjoys playing, laughing, joking, and being a kid just as much as children who do not work, but the priorities are shifted. Because of where these children and their families sit in a global economic structure, children take on part of the responsibility of providing economically for themselves at an earlier age. Childhood is in the process of being renegotiated in sub-Saharan Africa. Local legislation that may limit or prohibit child labor should keep local realities in mind. The trajectory of redefining childhood does not have to take a cookie cutter Western approach, although this is difficult in practice given the reality that much child labor legislation in sub-Saharan Africa first emanates from UN conventions. The shift from work to formal schooling may not happen so quickly in sub-Saharan African countries because educational infrastructure is not well developed. It is often not an either/or choice. For many children, apprenticeship systems often provide more long-term economic stability than years of formal schooling. The type of work that a child takes influences the nurturing and training he or she receives. In this way, children’s work shapes the different meanings of childhood in a given culture.

Window Dressing: Assessing Child Work and Child Labor From the perspective of richer countries, children who take on adult responsibilities and become producers at an early age impede future economic growth and development, because they forgo educational opportunities. Most of these children, though, are served by an educational system that resembles a sinking or sunken ship—a consequence of a fragile state that is either unwilling or unable to provide what is needed. Most children who work do so as part of a household strategy to ensure the economic well-being of the family. Increasingly, international aid agencies are articulating a difference between child work on the one hand, and child labor on the other. Child work is considered to be acceptable and may be regarded as useful, whereas child labor is often hazardous, exploitative, or unacceptable: “The ILO [International Labor Organization] is not against all forms of child work. We have no problem with the little girl who helps her mother with the housework or cooking, or the boy or girl who does unpaid work in a small family business. . . . The same is true of those odd jobs that children may

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occasionally take on to earn a little pocket money to buy something they really want.”7 The distinction between child work and child labor therefore maintains that unpaid work for parents’ income-earning enterprises, and paid work for pocket money, are both acceptable. However, this distinction does not protect children with landless parents who find themselves working to buy basic necessities and who often work for nonfamily employers.8 These children are the least able to give up work. Defining acceptable work is a step in the right direction, but in this case only highlights how difficult it is to develop sensible policies and laws that benefit children and take their needs into consideration.

Policy Implications If we were to wait for the demographic transition and its effects to take their course, child labor would eventually nearly disappear, but waiting for change would be like watching a glacier melt. With the increasingly integrated global economy, children in developing countries do need help from the outside in order to become competitive in an increasingly interconnected world. Concerned groups, governments, and international institutions do not yet agree on a core set of solutions to the child labor problem. There are three cadres: those who want to abolish child labor, those who want to protect children from oppressive work conditions that may compromise their development, and those who hope to prohibit all forms of work for children.9 The resulting laws reflect the ideas of all three groups of thinkers on the subject. This is a splintered approach with conflicting objectives and results. Instead, I propose the following policy recommendations that take into account the wishes of children: • State and local governments should take a hard-line stance on the most exploitative forms of child labor—slavery, involuntary servitude, prostitution, religious begging, sex work, and the work of war. Clearly, these forms of child labor cannot be tolerated and have no educational or redeeming value for children. If country governments cannot protect children in these clearly exploitative situations, the international community has a humanitarian obligation to step in. There is a moral obligation to protect those children whose families can no longer care for them. • Policymakers should take children’s preferences into account when they propose new laws prohibiting or limiting child labor. Most laws consider children as objects to be protected rather than as actors or subjects who can affect and shape their own futures. Many children need or want to work, and many other children want both to work and to attend school. Children who currently work in sub-Saharan African countries would wel-

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come a school option at the end of a six-hour workday. If the workday is sixteen hours long, however, school is not possible. Proposed responses should reflect the perspectives and needs of children, rather than the appearances or reputations of country governments. • Member states of the United Nations should reevaluate existing child labor conventions and laws so that they are relevant on the local level. Laws hoping to improve or promote children’s well-being must consider the wants and needs of working children and their families. At present these laws come with an abundance of good intentions but often lack enforcement mechanisms or responses to the underlying conditions, such as poverty and inequality, that compel children to work. • Research and reports should not be substitutes for action. Rather than write another watered-down report on human trafficking that is more reflective of political relationships between countries and international actors than of the situation of trafficked persons, why not spend the money on programs geared to putting skills and therefore money in the hands of poor families and children who are likely to be trafficked in poor countries? More money should be spent on concrete projects rather than public awareness campaigns geared at children in rich countries. Still, a sincere humantrafficking report issued by world governments and the international community could persuade country governments to do right by their children. • Apprenticeships in craft trades should not be dismissed out-of-hand as being harmful to children. At present, apprenticeships provide upward social mobility, economic stability, and a vocational education for children who do not attend formal schooling. Some regulation and oversight at the local level could improve these opportunities so that they are less open to exploitation. In short, children should not be locked in a workshop without food, water, or a toilet with eight other children at night. Apprenticeships can be used as stepping-stones for children to acquire more skills, which will, in turn, grant them more opportunities to offer their own children in the future. • Apprenticeships should be made available to girls. Nongovernmental organizations and aid groups could offer apprenticeships for girls in fields previously closed to them, such as tailoring and shoemaking. In addition to offering technical skills, the girls could then be required to meet for basic mathematical and literacy training. • International aid and development groups can make work and school compatible by considering what children want and augmenting them with the tools they will need in twenty years. Country governments can provide regulations that require employers to limit the number of work hours and bear the basic costs of primary education for a child worker. International aid groups can emulate the “earn and learn” model of Zimbabwe by establishing viable commercial work settings that balance formal schooling and

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income-earning potential for children. Children who need income in the immediate term will no longer be required to compromise their future earning potential by working. Children who are educated are much more likely to innovate as adults. Not only will these children benefit in the present, but their offspring will also benefit from their higher earning potential as adults. The “earn and learn” model could eventually be replaced by fulltime schooling as the tide of economic development rises. • Direct investment in education and the rural economy must accompany any policies with the goal of enhancing children’s well-being. Most children reside in rural areas, yet most of the alternatives to work, such as formal schooling, are located in urban areas. Creating opportunities in rural areas will stem urban migration in the short term, and will also create a rural population who can innovate and compete with their urban counterparts, which in turn may help alleviate the rural-urban opportunity divide as well as the need to for child labor. Much like the successful development model of Asia, African governments can finance economic growth and development by investing in rather than neglecting agricultural production. • Children’s work should be considered as part of a household budget. It cannot be limited without affecting others within the household. For example, children who work in market vending often give most or all of their incomes to their mothers, who then use it to put more meat in the dinner stew or pay for the education of younger or male siblings. Because most children are tied to households, the needs of the entire family should be considered before their work is prohibited or limited by law. Most of the responses to the child labor problem to date reflect assumptions that may or may not be true rather than the preferences of children. Most children are involved in a balancing act between the carrot, which could be income or training from work or formal educational inputs, and the stick, legislation that may limit their work so that they can attend formal schooling. The underlying assumptions here, though, are (1) that education is widely available, which unfortunately is not always the case, and (2) that education is of adequate quality to be considered training, which again is not always the case. Adding to this, well-meaning consumers in developed countries have grown more aware of the widespread use of child labor and have pressured manufacturers to clean up their act. The manufacturing sector is so small in sub-Saharan Africa and includes so few of all the children who work that the impact of this type of pressure is veritably negligible in the African context. It is also true that more condemnation only forces children into more hidden and therefore more exploitative forms of work. In the long run, child labor will remain a problem until sub-Saharan

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African countries are integrated into the modern global economy as full and equal participants. Inequality perpetuates corrupt governments, war, and the poverty that makes most of child labor a rational and necessary choice of families. Yet like the drought that leaves fields barren, inequality more often seems to require an act of God to address. This does not mean that the task is impossible. But until the world summons the necessary will and creativity, child labor can be mitigated only through programs that make work and school complementary instead of mutually exclusive.

Notes 1. Proverb from the Congo. 2. Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UN press release, December 4, 1998. 3. Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1924. 4. Best, Troubling Children, p. 7. 5. Gugler, Cities in the Developing World. 6. Best, Troubling Children. 7. International Labour Organization, World of Work, pp. 6–7. 8. White, “Children, Work, and Child Labour.” 9. Ibid.

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Index

Abductions, 166–168 Achebe, Chinua, 35 Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS): effect of pandemic, 57–59; orphans from, 59, 82, 96, 180; prostitution and, 174; slavery and, 148; warfare and, 164–166 Africa, sub-Saharan: democratization in, 55–56; foreign debt in, 37; missionary influence in, 30, 34–36; nation-state system in, 31–32, 56; pre-colonial era, 30; triple heritage of, 11, 16–19 African Union, 55, 70n31 Africa Report, 52 Age, 143–144 Agriculture: child labor as education in, 22–23; commercial, 86–87; direct investment in, 182–183, 188; labor as women’s work, 23; as main employer of children, 8–9, 44; subsidies, 61–62; subsistence, 83–86 AIDS. See Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Almudos, 29 Al-Qaida, 162 American Economics Association, 112 Amnesty International, 149 Angola: child soldiers, 57, 161, 164–165, 168; corruption, 54–55; DRC intervention by, 164; international conventions on labor, 66; religion, 19 Annan, Kofi, 173 Apprenticeship: boys fostered for,

88–89; in colonial era, 33–34; ethnicity and locale as factors in, 132–133; family relations, 89, 97; girls and, 187; as indigenous form of education, 22–23, 94–96, 116; value of, 187 Arabic language study, 108, 110, 121 Ariès, Philippe, 15–16 Bales, Kevin, 152–153 Bambara (people), 130, 154 Begging: as education, 140; as exploitation, 148; household economic strategies around, 142; kinship and locale as factor in, 133; as service, 25–26; as type of fostered children’s work, 88 Benin: domestic workers, 91, 155–156; religion, 18; trafficking of children, 90, 147, 153–157, 160–161 Berber (people), 149 Berlin Conference (1884–1885), 30 Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate, and Confectionary Alliance, 158–159 Boarding schools, 167 Bobo (people), 38 Bonded labor, 89–90 Botswana: AIDS, 57–59; child labor rates, 44; corruption, 55; drop in child labor, 44; military spending, 32; rates of child labor, 80; religion, 19 Bridewealth, 75 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 10, 158, 176

205

206

Index

Brown, Gordon, 12 Buganda, 32 Burkina Faso: child labor in Côte d’Ivoire from, 60, 157–158; drop in child labor, 44; education, 106–107; religion, 18–19; trafficking of children to, 153 Burundi: child soldiers, 57, 161–162; ethnic discrimination, 56; instability in, 31, 164; kinship ties, 166; poverty, 43; refugees in, 164; religion, 19; sexual exploitation of children, 159 Cable News Network (CNN), 176 Cameroon: coffee growing, 86; drop in child labor, 44; education, 38, 117; religion, 18; spatial relations, 138; trafficking in children, 156 Cash crops, 32–33, 86–87 Central African Republic, 153 Chad: DRC intervention by, 164; education, 113; instability in, 31; international conventions on labor, 65; religion, 19 Chattel slavery, 149 Childcare, 138 Childhood: age as structural factor in, 143–144; as construct, 15–16; defining, 39, 180, 184–185; economic base of, 76; in urban Africa, 74; in the West, 73–74 Child labor: African perspectives on, 11; age as structural factor in, 143–144; children’s preferences and, 186–187; child work vs., 185–186; colonial encouragement of, 32–33; criminalization of, 9, 68; definitions of, 7; as education, 21–23, 138–141; exploitative forms of, 12, 147–148, 175–176, 181–182, 186; fostering and, 88–90; functionality of, 29–30; gender divisions, 23–24, 90–91, 126–132; historical view, 22, 179; household economic strategies around, 141–142, 148, 183, 188; international competition and, 60–62; invisible nature of, 33–34; literacy and, 103fig, 104fig, 105–106; as mixed blessing, 3, 6; policy implications for, 186–189; poverty as factor in, 5–6, 39–40,

43–44, 81, 175; as predominately agricultural, 8–9, 44; rates of, 4, 5fig, 7, 8fig; rural types of, 83–88; as a social problem, 9–11; spatial relations, 135–138; in tourism, 108–110, 131; value of, 12, 125, 181; voluntary, 172; and Western consumer products, 10 Child mortality rates, 49 Children: as both students and workers, 99–100, 103, 114, 117–120; economic value of, 73–74; as family providers, 141–142, 148, 183, 188; fostering by employers, 23; household tasks, 19–22; international investment in, 187; as market traders, 8, 28–29, 92–94, 126–131; as percentage of population, 3–4; reasons for working, 182–184; remittances to family by, 38; as slaves, 58; stratification influences for, 144; trafficking in, 89–90; urban, 94–97; as urban migrants, 38; views on work, 3; violence’s impact on, 36 Child soldiers: demobilization of, 168–172; as diamond miners, 87; drug use by, 57; fearlessness of, 162, 168; forcible induction of, 36, 161–163; international conventions on, 66–67; numbers of, 57; orphans as, 166–167; taking responsibility for, 173; U.N. protocol on, 66–67; and weakening of kinship ties, 164–165 Child work, 185–186. See also Child labor Chiluba, Frederick, 55 China, 151 Chocolate, 10, 148. See also Cocoa production Christianity: anti-slavery organizations, 150; vs. Islam, 24; literacy and, 24; regional influence of, 16, 17tab, 18tab, 19; as supportive of colonialism, 30 Circumcision, 89 Civil wars, 36, 56–57 Clay, Henry, 60 Cocoa production: child slavery and,

Index 148; chocolate consumption rates, 10; for export, 86; fair trade label for, 158; free trade and, 60–61; trafficking of children for, 156–159; Western interest in child labor in, 10 Coffee: British role in production of, 32; as cash crop, 86; child workers as family providers, 142; fair trade, 158; trafficking of children for production of, 153 Colonialism: child labor perspective of, 11, 33–34; Christianity’s supporting role in, 30; education and, 101–102, 122n11; national boundaries and, 31 Competition, international, 60 Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC): child soldiers, 57, 67, 161, 168; civil war, 36; foreign intervention in, 163; instability, 31; international conventions on labor, 66–68; kinship ties, 165–166; military spending, 32; mining, 87; refugees, 164; religion, 19 Congo-Brazzaville, 18–19, 51, 161 Congolese Rally for Democracy, 166 Consumer products, Western, 10 Contractual slavery, 149 Corruption, 53–56, 69, 189 Costa Rica, 158 Côte d’Ivoire: child emigration to, 90; cocoa plantations’ use of child labor, 10, 60; coffee and cocoa growing, 86; corruption, 54; education, 108, 114; extravagance in, 52–53; French role in cash crop production, 32; immigration to, 31; income inequalities, 50; international conventions on labor, 65–66; rates of child labor, 80; refugees in, 162; slavery, 149; trafficking of children, 153–154, 157–159 Cotton, 153, 156 Crafts, indigenous, 32 Daara, 26 Da Gama, Vasco, 24 Debt, 37, 53, 180; bondage, 149; writeoffs, 51 Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 19 Development indicators, 4–5

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Diamonds, 87, 162, 164 Dinka (people), 150 Dionne, Mbay, 27 Diouf, Abdoulaye, 55 Dioula (people), 35, 56, 107–108 Disposable People (Bales), 152–153 Domestic servants: considered as in training, 140; kinship ties among, 88–89; trafficking in, 155–156, 159–161; in urban areas, 91–92 Dropouts, 113–114, 118 Drugs, 57, 66 Dutch East India Company, 33 Economic development, 36, 112, 182–183 Education: as antithetic to purdah, 29–30; begging as, 140; colonial influence on, 101–102, 122n11; corruption and, 54; costs of, 116; dropouts, 113–114, 118; earn-andlearn schools, 114, 117–118, 181, 187–188; fathers’ levels of, 105–106; fostering and, 90; funding for, 111–112; gender differences in, 117; in the home, 84–86; inadequacy of school systems, 108, 110–112, 185, 188; Islamic, 25–28, 101, 129–130; as key to economic development, 112; lack of village schools, 38; language study, 108, 110, 121; by missionaries, 30, 34–35; parental attitudes toward, 102, 106–108, 110–112, 120–121, 181; in postindependence Africa, 101–102; primary school enrollment levels, 103fig, 104fig, 105; in the Quran, 25–28; relevancy in rural areas of, 112–113; rural-urban divide, 81, 101–102; secondary, 113–114, 122n41; value of, 106–110; of working children, 99–100, 103, 114, 117–120 Election fraud, 55 English language study, 108, 110, 121 Equatorial Guinea, 19 Eritrea, 19, 173 Ethiopia: child soldiers, 161, 169, 173; civil war, 36; coffee growing, 86; education, 114; military spending, 32; orphans from AIDS, 59; poverty,

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43; religion, 19; rural-urban divide, 77 Ethnic conflict, 56–57 Ethnicity, 132–135 Etireno, MV (ship), 156–157 Europe, 156, 159 Ewe (people), 152 Families: children as providers for, 141–142, 148, 183, 188; lineagebased, 37, 74–76; nuclear, 75; partnership, 37, 75–76; polygynous, 37, 75; urban apprentices’ relations with their own, 89, 97 FESPACO West African film festival, 28 Fisheries, 156 Forced labor, 66, 71n33 Forced marriage, 168 Fostering: as disguise for slavery, 151; by employers, 23; by relatives, 38; from rural to urban, 88–90 Fragile states, 68 France, 32, 70n29 Free trade, 60–62 French language study, 108, 110, 121 Fulani (people), 31 Fulbe (people), 25 Gabon: international conventions on labor, 65; rates of child labor, 44, 80; religion, 19; trafficking of children to, 147, 153–156 Gambia, 19, 31, 44, 134 Gender: child emigration differences by, 90; marketplace differences by, 126–132; social stratification and, 23; types of urban labor by, 90–91; and work availability, 24. See also Women/girls Ghana: British role in cocoa production, 32; under British rule, 122n11; children’s views of work, 3; cocoa production, 157; education, 99–100, 107, 114, 117, 183; fair trade coffee, 158; household work of children, 20–21; income inequalities, 50; international businesses in, 60–61; international conventions on labor, 65; literacy and child labor, 106;

religion, 18; rice subsidies, 62; spatial relations, 138; Trokosi slavery, 149, 151–152, 175 Girls. See Women/girls Gold, 87–88 Gris-gris, 17 Guinea: as colonial construct, 31; emigrants from, 129, 133, 139; international conventions on labor, 65; prostitution, 174; refugees, 162; religion, 19; trafficking for prostitution, 159 Guinea-Bissau, 18–19, 43, 65 Hausa (people), 7–8, 28–31 Hazardous work, 176 HIV. See Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Horn of Africa: Christianity vs. Islam in, 24 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 52–54 Household chores, 100, 185 Human rights, 67 Human Rights Watch, 168 Hutu (people), 57, 164 Igbo (people), 31, 35 Income inequalities, 49–51 Income levels, 44, 45fig, 46fig India, 10, 20, 117 Industrialization, 30 International Conventions: on child soldiers, 66–67; on drugs, 66; on labor, 65–66; on prostitution, 66–67; on slavery, 66, 149; UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, 19, 66–67, 175 International Labour Organization (ILO): African views on child labor, 15; on child work, 185–186; international conventions, 66; most exploitative forms of child labor, 148; poverty as factor in child labor, 5; trafficking in children, 90 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 61–62 Islam: child labor perspective of, 11; conversion of Africans to, 24–25; education in, 25–28, 101, 129–130; literacy and, 24; and military rule, 163; regional influence of, 16, 17tab,

Index 18–19; vs. Christianity, 24; women in purdah, 28–30; women’s education, 131 Italy, 156, 159 Japan, 20, 61 Jihads, 25 Jubilee 2000, 51 Kabbah, Ahmed Tejan, 162 Kabila, Laurent, 163–164 Kenya: age differences in pay levels, 143; British role in cash crop production, 32; under British rule, 122n11; Burundian militias’ recruitment of children from, 164; children’s well-being, 48; child soldiers, 67; coffee growing, 86; as colonial construct, 31; debt servicing, 51; domestic workers, 91–92; education, 109–110, 113, 131; free trade, 60; household tasks of children, 20; international conventions on labor, 66; orphans from AIDS, 59; religion, 19; rural-urban divide, 77; Somalis in, 31; spatial relations, 138 Kidane, Yemane, 173 Kinship ties, 88–89, 132–135, 165–166, 173–175, 183 Koehler, Horst, 61 Korea, South, 183 Labor laws: enforcement difficulties, 9–10; ineffectiveness of, 62, 67–70, 180, 187; international conventions, 62, 63tab, 64tab, 65–67; in Sudan, 58 Land grants, 35–36 Leather industry, 22–23, 94 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 30 Lesotho, 59 Liberia: child soldiers, 57, 161–162, 165, 169; civil war, 36; international conventions on labor, 65–66; mining, 87; prostitution, 174; religion, 18; sexual exploitation of children, 159 Lineage-based families, 37, 74–76 Literacy, 24, 103tab, 104tab, 105–106, 115 Loan defaults, 37

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Lord’s Resistance Army, 58, 163, 167–168, 170 Madagascar: coffee growing, 86; debt servicing, 51; ethnicity and locale in, 134; urban children, 81–82; women’s work opportunities, 131–132; working students, 119–120 Malawi: AIDS, 57, 59; drop in child labor, 44; education, 112; poverty, 43; religion, 19; tobacco growing, 86 Mali: child labor in Côte d’Ivoire from, 60; domestic workers, 91; education, 90, 101–102, 111, 113–114; French role in cash crop production, 32; mining, 87; peanut growing, 86; religion, 19; slavery, 149; trafficking of children, 154, 157–159 Mandinke (people), 56, 107 Mansa Kankan Musa, 25 Marabouts, 25–26, 129–130, 133, 142 Markets: children as traders, 8, 28–29, 92–94, 126–131; gender roles in, 126–132; as venues for trafficking children, 154–155. See also Vending Marriage. See Families Masai (people), 31, 113–114 Masters and Servants Act (1899), 34 Mauritania: international conventions on labor, 66; jihads, 25; mining, 87; oppression of Wolof people, 31; religion, 19; slavery, 148–149, 151 Metalworking, 95 Mexico, 20 Military spending, 32 Mining: age and pay levels, 143; children as sweepers, 34; international conventions on, 66; as rural child labor, 87–88; of salt, 149; slavery and, 149 Missionaries, 30, 34–36 Mobutu Sese Seko, 32, 52, 70n29, 163 Mohamed, Mahdi Ibrahim, 150 Moi, Daniel Arap, 53 Morice, Alain, 22 Mouride brotherhood, 25, 133 Mozambique, 32, 65, 134 Mugabe, Robert, 53, 55 Mujahidin, 173 Musa, Mansa Kankan, 25

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Museveni, Yoweri, 163 Muzrui, Ali, 11 Namibia: child labor rates, 44; child soldiers, 67, 164; corruption, 55; DRC intervention by, 164; religion, 19 National Resistance Movement (Uganda), 163 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 165 Nationhood, 30 Nation-states, 31–32 Nestlé, 158–159 Niger, 19, 43, 149–150, 153 Nigeria: apprenticeships, 22–23, 94; bonded labor, 89–90; under British rule, 122n11; child emigration to, 90; civil war, 36; cocoa production, 157; as colonial construct, 31; household work of children, 21; international conventions on labor, 65; religion, 19; trafficking of children, 147, 153, 155, 157 Northern Rhodesia. See Zambia Nuclear families, 75 Organization of African Unity (OAU), 55 Orphans: AIDS and, 59, 82, 96, 180; as child soldiers, 166–167; as domestic workers, 91; as vulnerable to exploitation, 148, 184 Oxfam International: free trade, 60 Pare (people): attitudes toward children, 74, 77; gender differences in child labor, 23–24; marriage types, 74–76, 80 Partnership families, 37, 75–76 Peanuts, 32, 86, 145n6 Peul (people), 128–129 Philippines, 20 Picannins, 34, 87 Polygyny, 37, 75 Poomkara (people), 117 Population, 78–79 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 36 Poular (people), 56, 107 Poverty: child well-being and, 48–49; corruption and, 53–56; as factor in

child labor, 5–6, 39–40, 43–44, 81, 175; income inequalities and, 49–51; rural-urban divide and, 44, 47, 182 Powell, Colin, 148 Private schools, 108, 110–112 Prostitution: in Europe, 156, 159; international conventions regarding, 66–67; numbers of children in, 71n33, 174; trafficking for, 156, 159, 161; weakening of kinship ties and, 173–174. See also Rape Psuedokin, 88 Public schools, 108, 110–112, 115–116 Purdah, 28–30 Quran, 25–28 Rape, 167–168. See also Prostitution; Sexual exploitation Rawlings, Jerry, 53 Refugees, 162, 164, 174 Religion: indigenous, 151–152; in subSaharan Africa, 16–19. See also Christianity; Islam Revolutionary United Front (RUF; Sierra Leone), 87, 162, 165–167, 170 Rural-urban divide, 37–40; in apprenticeships, 94–96; childhood and, 73; economic hardship and, 96; in education, 106–108, 111–112; marriage types and, 74–76; poverty and, 44, 47, 182 Rwanda: child soldiers in, 57, 67, 161, 164, 168–169; civil war, 36; demobilization of soldiers, 170; DRC intervention by, 163; ethnic discrimination, 56; instability in, 31; kinship ties, 166; military spending, 32; religion, 19; sexual exploitation of children, 159 Salt mining, 149 Savimbi, Jonas, 165 Secondary education, 113–114, 122n41 Senegal: begging, 25–26, 134, 148; child labor as women’s work, 23; child labor in the market, 8, 92–94, 126–131; domestic workers, 89, 91; drop in child labor, 44; economic sectors, 145n6; education, 107–108, 110, 115–116; French role in cash

Index crop production, 32; gender differences in work availability, 24, 126–131; household economic strategies, 141–142; immigration to, 31; kinship ties, 132–135; peanut growing, 86; religion, 19; separatism, 56; spatial relations, 135–137; talibes, 26–27; trafficking of children, 154–155 Sennar, 24 Sereer (people): beggars among, 27; education among, 107; as employees of missionaries, 35; gender stratification among, 127–128, 130; kinship and local ties among, 132; in Senegal, 56 Sexual exploitation, 159. See also Rape; Prostitution Sex work. See Prostitution Shoemaking, 89, 129, 136–137 Sierra Leone: child labor laws, 69; child soldiers in, 57, 161–162, 165, 168; civil war, 36; corruption, 54, 69; demobilization of soldiers, 170–172; international conventions on labor, 65–67; Liberian support for RUF, 162; military spending, 32; mining, 87; prostitution, 174; religion, 18; sexual exploitation of children, 159 Slavery: and AIDS, 148; children and, 149–152; Christian organizations against, 150; in cocoa production, 148; Dutch beliefs about, 33; fostering as excuse for, 151; international conventions regarding, 66, 149; in Sudan, 58, 149–150, 173; trafficking of children as, 152–157; Trokosi practices, 149, 151–152, 175; types of, 149; in West Africa, 148, 156 Social activism, 28, 51 Social capital, 183 Social disarticulation, 165 Social reproduction, 84, 86, 90 Social safety nets, 70 Somali (people), 31 Somalia, 19, 36, 159 South Africa: AIDS infection rates, 57; child labor rates, 44; education, 102; free trade, 60; income inequalities, 50–51; international conventions, 66; invisible nature of child labor, 33; mining, 87; rates of child labor,

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80; religion, 19; urbanization in, 77 Southern Rhodesia. See Zimbabwe South Korea, 183 Spain, 159 SPLA. See Sudan People’s Liberation Army Street children, 48 Structural adjustment programs (SAPs), 37, 180 Subsistence economy, 38 Sudan: child labor laws, 58; child soldiers in, 57, 161, 166; civil war, 36, 163; demobilization of soldiers, 170; DRC intervention by, 164; education in the home, 85; household work of children, 21; instability in, 31; international conventions on labor, 65–66; military spending, 32; religion, 19; sexual abuse by soldiers, 168; slavery, 58, 149–150, 173; women’s work opportunities, 132 Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), 163, 166–167, 173 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery (1956), 149 Swahili, 24 Swaziland, 19, 59, 65 Tailoring, 137 Talibes, 25–28, 133, 142, 148 Talisman, 151 Tallensi (people), 20–21 Tanzania: coffee growing, 86, 138, 142; as colonial construct, 31; education, 81–82, 113–114; free trade, 60; household economic strategies, 142, 183; household work of children, 22; mining, 87–88; partnership families, 37; plantation labor, 138, 141; prostitution, 174; refugees, 164; ruralurban divide, 77, 81–82; tobacco growing, 86–87, 141; women’s work opportunities, 131 Tariffs, 61 Taxes, 32, 35 Taylor, Charles, 53, 162 Thailand, 183 Things Fall Apart (Achebe), 35 Tidiane brotherhood, 25, 27 Tobacco, 86–87 Togo: domestic workers, 91, 155; edu-

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cation, 112–113; religion, 18; trafficking of children, 147, 153, 155–157 Tonga (people), 83–85 Toucouleur (people), 134 Tourism, 108–110, 131 Trafficking of children, 89–90, 147–148, 152–157 Trokosi, 149, 151–152, 175 Tuareg (people), 25 Tutsi (people), 57, 164 Uganda: AIDS effect on, 59; cash crop vs. craft production, 32; child soldiers in, 57, 161, 163, 167–168; coffee growing, 86; demobilization of soldiers, 170; DRC intervention by, 163; international conventions on labor, 65–66; refugees, 164; religion, 19; tobacco growing, 86 Uncles, 88–89 United Kingdom, 32, 156 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF): begging by talibes, 25–26; child mortality and debt repayment, 53; Joint Program on HIV/AIDS, 59; rape and forced marriages, 168; trafficking in children, 153, 156–157 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), 19, 66–67, 175 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 174 United States, 20, 61–62, 70n29 Urban Africa: child labor, 9, 77, 80, 82; children of, 94–97; as focus for economic development, 36; migrant men in, 74–75; as recent development, 22, 77; types of child labor in, 91–96 Vending: by children of mothers in purdah, 28; education and, 114, 116; gender stratification in, 126–132; by mothers and children, 8. See also Markets Violence, 36 Von Bismarck, Otto, 30 Wage system, 74–75 Wealth flows, 74

West Africa, 24–25 Westernization, 30 Wolof (people): as beggars, 134; Berbers’ discrimination against, 31; divided by national boundaries, 31; education, 107; gender stratification, 127, 129–130; kinship and locale ties, 132–133; in Senegal, 56 Women/girls: in agriculture, 23, 83–84; as apprentices, 187; education in Islamic cultures, 131; education’s influence on, perceived, 85; as market vendors, 126–133; as missionary employees, 35; in purdah, 28–30; wage economy’s effect on, 75. See also Gender Wool, 32 World Bank, 37 World Trade Organization (WTO), 61 Xarek Maral a Almodou (Thior), 28 Yoruba (people), 21–22, 31 Zaire. See Congo, Democratic Republic of Zakat, 25 Zambia: AIDS infection rates, 57; AIDS orphans, 59; under British rule, 122n11; children employed in subsistence agriculture, 83–85; corruption, 55; domestic workers, 92; free trade, 60; income inequalities, 50–51; invisibility of child labor, 34; mining, 87; plantation labor, 138; rates of child labor, 80; religion, 19; tobacco growing, 86; urbanization, 77 Zimbabwe: age and pay levels, 143; agricultural child labor, 33–34, 36, 85, 134–135, 138; AIDS effect on, 59; AIDS infection rates, 57; child labor in colonial era, 33–34; DRC intervention by, 164; earn-and-learn schools, 114, 117–118, 181, 187; education, 114, 117–118, 181, 183; farm labor as women’s work, 23; free trade, 60; household economic strategies, 142; mining, 87; mission stations, 30, 33, 35; spatial relations, 138; tobacco growing, 86

About the Book

Although both media and scholarly attention to the use of child labor has focused on Asia and Latin America, the highest incidence of the practice is found in Africa, where one in three children works. Loretta Bass presents a comprehensive, systematic study of child labor in sub-Saharan Africa. Bass offers a window on the lives of Africa’s children workers, a view informed by her analysis of the historical, economic, political, sociocultural, and legal factors framing child labor on the continent. Drawing on research from over forty countries, she discusses the political economy of child labor at the national, community, and household levels, the role of the education system, the differences between urban and rural child laborers, and the exploitation of children as soldiers, prostitutes, and slaves. Her concluding chapter confronts the benefits and costs of child labor and considers the prospects for policy aimed at creating positive social change. Loretta E. Bass is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma.

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