Policies and politics around children’s work in Ghana Working Paper 8

This paper explores policy and legislation aimed at preventing, regulating, and abolishing harmful children’s work in Ghana, and the political debates and controversies surrounding these mechanisms. The paper critically interrogates the successes and challenges of previous and current policies and interventions. It concludes that legislation and interventions aimed at preventing hazardous or harmful work should incorporate both the formal legislative rights discourse and the informal, traditional rights discourse to successfully navigate the political terrain, thereby accelerating attainment of common objectives.

ACHA is directed by Professor Rachel Sabates-Wheeler (r.sabates-wheeler@ids.ac.uk) and Dr James Sumberg.Table 1.Children's work targeted for regulation or elimination in Ghana This paper explores policy and legislation aimed at preventing, regulating and abolishing harmful children's work in Ghana, and the political debates and controversies surrounding these mechanisms.
Children's work in sectors such as agriculture, trading, fishing, and a host of others has emerged as an area of public concern over the past three decades.The Government of Ghana's view on harmful children's work in these and other sectors -as outlined in phases 1 (2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) and 2 (2017-2021) of the National Plan of Action for the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour (hereafter NPA I and NPA II) -is that it constitutes a breach of the dignity, personhood, wellbeing, development and fundamental human rights of the Ghanaian child.This view is supported by United Nations (UN) agencies, domestic and foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other development partners, which have long called upon and supported the Ghanaian government to put in place preventive and abolitionist measures against such jobs.The ensuing campaigns, laws, policies, advocacy campaigns, direct interventions and the other human, financial and material resources targeted at these prohibited forms of work over the past three decades have seen success in areas such as school enrolment.
They have also successfully ushered debates on 'child labour' into the centre of Ghanaian policymaking, civil society or NGO advocacy, academic research, and wider public discourse.
Yet, these efforts have also arguably been of limited effectiveness in terms of their central objective of disengaging children from the prohibited forms of work.Successes in awareness-raising and increased school enrolment have not succeeded in the primary goal of disengaging children from harmful forms of work, nor have they provided working children with good-quality education (Carter et al. 2020;Ghanney, Dughan and Bentil 2020;Hamenoo, Dwomoh and Dako-Gyeke 2018).The number of children involved in prohibited forms of work in Ghana and those combining such work with schooling has persistently risen rather than decreased (Aboa and Ross 2020; Understanding Children's Work (UCW) Programme 2016b; Darko 2014; Baah, Anchirinah and Badu-Yeboah 2009), leading to questions about the effectiveness of the extant child labour abolitionist legislation, campaigns and interventions, especially their suitability to the country's historical, sociocultural, economic and political realities (Imoh 2012;Okyere 2012).Fishing, farming, mining and other constituencies that have been the target of child labour abolitionist interventions have expressed misgivings about the 'tutelage' or 'civilising' approach adopted by some of these measures (Nti 2017).They challenge what they consider as efforts to impose particular forms of childhood and children's socialisation on them through campaigns and narratives that delegitimise virtuous autochthonous cultures and child socialisation mechanisms and also overlook the socioeconomic drivers of children's work (Jonah and Abebe 2019;Okyere 2013).
This Working Paper elaborates on the foregoing and other contestations surrounding Ghanaian children's work by firstly providing an overview of the situation of children's work in Ghana.
The discussion then outlines the major national legislation, policies and initiatives targeted at the elimination of work deemed harmful, hazardous or inimical to children's welfare and development.The third section of the paper provides an evaluative analysis of the successes and failures of these preventive interventions, highlighting the linked obstacles or limitations where their impact has been underwhelming.Here, the paper highlights the fact that approaches to children's work in Ghana are located within two rights discourses and practices that are sometimes complementary and sometimes in opposition to each other.There is, on the one hand, the formal legislative rights discourse and its related practices and norms on childhood, children's rights and children's work influenced mainly by international rights conventions, local and national NGO advocacy, and demands by (mainly) Western development partners such as the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU).On the other hand, there is the informal, traditional rights discourse and its related practices underpinned by autochthonous sociocultural Ghanaian norms on childhood, children's rights and children's work.
These two perspectives, the paper suggests, also sit at distinct levels of Ghanaian society and polity: the former mainly dominant at the level of government, NGO/civil society, urban, middle-class spheres, and the latter prevalent in working-class, socioeconomically marginalised communities and in rural areas.A number of concerns have been raised about such classifications.For example, scholars such as Berlan (2004), Okyere (2013;2018) and Howard (2017) have questioned whether children's participation in cocoa farming, domestic work, fishing and other activities can be deemed outright exploitative or harmful at face value or without consideration of the specificities surrounding their involvement.The line between acceptable work and unacceptable work is not that easy to distinguish.Hence, while the Government of Ghana, ILO and other stakeholders identified fishing and all its related activities as 'categorical worst forms of child labour' following a study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) aimed at reducing child exploitation in Ghanaian agriculture (Zdunnek et al. 2008) that the involvement of children aged 7-14 years in prohibited activities had more than doubled, from 13 per cent to 29 per cent.enhance the knowledge base.
The full cost of NPA I is not provided in the policy documents or other sources, but the document states that the National Plan of Action was made possible through financial and technical support from ILO/IPEC, UNICEF and the IOM.Indeed, it is instructive to note that this flagship programme did not originate from within the Government of Ghana, but by ILO/IPEC through the Ghana National Programme Manager at the time (Government of the Republic of Ghana 2009: 6).This is not to suggest that there was no interest within the country in this initiative, but to underscore the very many ways in which programmes to prevent or eliminate child labour are usually directed by (mostly foreign) organisations and actors rather than national or state institutions.This is a potential explanation for the programme's lack of success, as acknowledged in the summary of findings and conclusions on NPA I set out in the NPA II policy document (Government of the Republic of Ghana 2017b).Although NPA I is said to have helped elevate the need to address child labour to a priority action status for many sectors, and saw some actions undertaken on each of its objectives, its overall impact was graded 'below expectation' (ibid.: 22).NPA I's underwhelming performance was identified at all levels, from implementation through to monitoring and evaluation.The Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare, through its Child Labour Unit (CLU) of the Labour Department, was given responsibility for the overall coordination and supervision of NPA I.However, the assessment report states that 'apart from donor-led interventions, which were monitored by the respective donors, little was done', due to failure by implementation agencies to provide reports and share information, staff capacity issues, and generally low collaborative efforts between the relevant parties (ibid.).Meanwhile, in southern Ghana, the Akans (made up of subgroups such as the Asante, Fante, Kwawu, Akuapim, Akyem, Nzema and Bono) marked the transition from childhood to adulthood (or adolescence) through bragoro, which is translated as 'life dance', to convey the idea that adult life begins at this stage (Crentsil 2014;Sarpong 1977).
Bragoro was performed for girls following their first menstruation and was thus also described with euphemistic expressions such as ƆayƐ bra (she is of age) or Ɔakum sono (she's killed an elephant) to communicate that she had now attained womanhood and capacity to face life challenges (Agyekum 2002;Sarpong 1977) 2006).Actors such as Free the Slaves, which adopts mainstream or conventional positions, tend to hold themselves up as being unquestionably more knowledgeable or objective than those in the communities where they work.It is with such hubris that they label parents and communities who disagree with the views they espouse as naïve or ignorant.Rarely do these actors critically interrogate the appropriateness of their views or the mechanisms through which they want others to adopt these views.Consequently, they do not learn from their mistakes, with the result being not only failed interventions but also the promotion of discourses rife with ethnocentrism, class, ethnic and religious prejudices.This is demonstrated by Bukari and Schareika (2015: 5) who describe mainline narratives targeted at nomadic groups such as the Fulani.Fulani children tend to herd family cattle and often face stigmatising narratives, such as this example from a teacher who participated in that study: 'Fulani are uneducated, uncivilized and never attend school nor take their children to school'.Per the standards which inform conventional international discourses underpinning Ghana's Children's Act, a normal childhood is one mainly characterised by rest, formal classroom-based schooling, and largely free from economic activities.
As such, the Fulani community's preference for informal education, cattle herding, and their nomadic lifestyle is held up by this teacher, like many others, as a sign of inadequate 'civilisation' (ibid.).There is no effort to understand the logic or values underpinning community preferences for this mode of socialisation and life.
One such value which is instilled into Ghanaian children from a young age is respect for elders and the need to contribute to their community's development and proper functioning.Instilling the sense of communal obligation was to impart the values of reciprocity, altruism and mutual contributions that underpinned the traditional welfare system (Ansah-Koi 2006).Children's upbringing was, and continues to be, regarded as the duty of the entire extended family, kinship structure or community networks, and not only of their biological parents (Badasu 2004;Allman 1997;Goody 1973;Oppong 1973;Goody 1966).
This is founded on the belief that children represent the continuity of not only their parents' or families' names, heritages and identities, but those of the wider communities.Secondly, as Badasu (2004) notes, the child's socialisation and introduction to the societal values and norms was seen as a duty that could not be performed by one person but by the whole community, a traditional education system.This social or communal approach to child upbringing also ensured that all children were provided with guardianship and care (Frimpong-Manso 2014: 411;Alber 2010;2003).This practice has waned in some parts of the country due to the loosening of social bonds catalysed by urbanisation, migration, adoption of alternative child-upbringing cultures, and other aspects of social change, but it is still prevalent in some areas and is the foundation of the traditional child fosterage system (Pennington and Harpending 1993) -a practice that is misinterpreted as 'child trafficking' in some accounts (see, for example, International Justice Mission (IJM) 2016).
Regardless of the family, household or community in which they lived, children were introduced to work at an early age and expected to contribute, through their work, to the socioeconomic wellbeing of their family and wider community (Yeboah 2020;Sackey and Johannesen 2015;Sarpong 1974).
As Takyi (2014: 38) notes, this was integral to children's socialisation because traditionally, parents and extended families were regarded as failures if their children grew up lazy or without the skills or abilities to cater for their own families in turn.The value of work was thus instilled in children at the earliest opportunity and, as Takyi (2014: 38, citing Nukunya, 2003: 51) adds, 'economic activities' are among the main skills and competencies which Ghanaian parents teach their children in the socialisation process.Adult caregivers would often express grave concern that the lazy child or one who shied away from work was going to fail in life; some would consequently send their children to live with other relatives or others in the communities who could encourage the child to be more diligent.
Children's work ranged from domestic chores (taking care of siblings, helping to cook family meals, washing of clothes) through to subsistence and even income-earning activities (including farming and tending livestock).

Continued permissibility and place for work in Ghanaian children's lives
This attitude towards work in children's lives has been maintained even as urbanisation and ruralurban migration has occurred (Yeboah 2020), and is reflected in the duties and expectations of children even within the public education system (Mohammed Gunu 2018; Twum-Danso 2009).
For example, the Ghana Education Service's (GES) Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Facilities Planning and Management Guide lists the maintenance of school WASH facilities as one of pupils' responsibilities (Moojiman, Esseku and Tay 2013: 11).Where schools are unable to afford janitors or cleaners, the guidance mandates headteachers to require pupils to clean, sweep and scrub toilets, fill water tanks and carry out other tasks required for maintaining hygiene in the school (ibid.).The GES WASH in Schools National Implementation Model document further stipulates that 'where school pupils are required to do the cleaning, a schedule must be prepared for both boys and girls to undertake the cleaning under the supervision of a teacher' (GES 2014: 6).
It is instructive to note that similar policies exist in other African and non-Western nations.For instance, under the 'o-soji' (cleaning) tradition in Japan, schools pupils, rather than janitors, clean some school facilities (Tsuneyoshi, Kusanagi and Takahashi 2016).Likewise, in 2016, Singapore's Ministry of Education announced a decision to make daily cleaning of school canteens, corridors and classrooms (though not toilets) a mandatory task for primary and secondary school children (The Independent News & Media 2016).In the Ghanaian context, in public schools and private ones alike, it is not unusual to find that pupils are required to arrive about 30 minutes ahead of lessons to sweep their classrooms and the schoolyard, scrub the toilets and undertake other cleaning duties.In rural areas especially, this can include weeding overgrown school compounds using cutlasses, hoes and other sharp implements -an activity that would likely be labelled as hazardous should it occur on a cocoa farm instead.The point here is not to idealise this situation as it occurs in a context where schools are unable to afford cleaning or grounds maintenance staff.Also, while these instances are incongruous with the GES guidance, it is nonetheless the case that sometimes pupils are made to work under conditions that can have deleterious impacts on the rest of their school day or, in the extreme, their entire schooling.
Berlan ( 2004) also provides an in-depth discussion of the Ghanaian work ethic concerning child labour, the issue of children using machetes to clear vegetation on the school compounds, as well as the tension between foreign policymaking and local realities on children's work in cocoa production.The paper highlights these examples to demonstrate the ubiquitous nature of work in Ghanaian children's lives across both informal or domestic and formal or schooling arenas owing to the positive associations that have traditionally been made (and are still made) between childhood and work.As we have demonstrated, the rationale behind this work ethic ranges from sanitation and hygiene reasons to formative and characterbuilding ideals.Besides their unpaid school and domestic chores, children can also be called upon to assist their families through diverse economic or income-earning activities within the confines of the home or outside (Ungruhe 2019;Agyei, Kumi and Yeboah 2016;Yeboah et al. 2015).Some of these children may be coerced or compelled into these activities through personal and impersonal forces, but there is also ample evidence that many Ghanaian children are highly entrepreneurial and take on a range of activities of their own volition to earn incomes for themselves (Yeboah 2020;Okyere 2013).Other children work becausewhile this might sound anathematic to the child labour preventive and abolitionist agenda -these children find it more worthwhile compared to other options, as Bruscino's ( 2001) study found.That study originally set out to explore ways of ending children's work in Yindure, a village in northern Ghana, and it involved children who were mostly literate or had attended school at some point (Bruscino 2001: 22).Most had expressed a desire to migrate to southern Ghana to work as they had heard they could make more money there -a point which links to the long-established trend of children's independent seasonal north-south labour migration discussed in depth by Kwankye et al. (2009;2007), Whitehead, Hashim and Iversen (2007), Whitehead and Hashim (2005), and others.Boys in Bruscino's study explained that they saw migration and work as a more rational response to their circumstances than schooling, as exemplified by this extract: The boys said they enjoyed their work and saw it as useful for their futures, which for all seemed to include becoming farmers.Their jobs were skill-building and seemed to be the crucial first steps toward their occupations.They said they enjoyed school too but thought that work was more useful.The gains from work are immediate -if they work today, they home food or money today.Although they gave most of the money to their families, the boys seemed to be working for themselves, self-initiating small service endeavours.One boy said he even farms his own plot of land.(Bruscino 2001: 22) It must be stated though that girls were less enthusiastic about work than boys.They preferred schooling because due to the gendered nature of labour and traditional roles, they had fewer opportunities to find work outside the home or to work for themselves and earn income.They often worked for others and were sometimes unpaid.Hence most girls stated that they would rather go to school in the hope that this would help them with their future career or lead to greater independence (ibid.).
Two messages can be gleaned from the findings of Brucino's study and those from similar studies of children's work in Ghana (Ungruhe 2019;Agyei et al. 2016;Yeboah et al. 2015).First, it is important to listen carefully to children to ensure a better understanding of their worldviews, individual preferences and lived experiences.Secondly, there is the need to engage with voices on both sides of the coin; those of girls, which suit the interests of actors seeking to prohibit certain forms of children's labour, and those of boys, which can often be 'unpalatable' to child labour abolitionist advocates.As scholars in the fields of childhood and children's labour have long argued, well-meaning programmes on children's work, backed by substantial financial, human and material resources, often fail to make any meaningful impact where working children, their parents, communities and other stakeholders who hold contrary views are excluded or not properly consulted (Stiglich 2020;Bourdillon and Carothers 2019;Morrow and Boyden 2018;Wells 2015;Bourdillon 2014;Crivello, Camfield and Woodhead 2009;Myers 2001;1999;Boyden and Ling 1998).Probably the most significant and ironic example of this is the fact that the ILO refused to invite organised groups of working children to participate in consultations on defining the criteria for acceptable working conditions for children at the IV Global Conference on the Sustained Eradication of Child Labour in Argentina in 2012 (Okyere 2017).Despite protests by these working children's unions, including a complaint to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (The Secretariat 2017), the ILO (as well as some other organisations) continues to exclude them from child labour deliberations though it nonetheless claims to represent the views and best interests of all working children.
The need to reach beyond only palatable voices or political positions is also because in reality there are many commonalities between the underlying visions of child labour abolitionists and those with a greater threshold for children's work.The permissibility of diverse forms of children's work in Ghanaian culture and traditions does not imply acceptance of work that is unquestionably inimical to children's wellbeing or development.Most families and children themselves are also acutely aware of the fact that work which subjects a child to physical harm, deprives him or her of food or rest, or overworks them is pathological.This is exemplified by Adonteng-Kissi's study, which compared the perceptions of parents in rural and urban Ghana on children's work and the relevant national legislation.Most participants felt that the laws reflected Western views and that there are 'differences between the local and western understandings of this relationship because of the cultural and economic significance of child work in the Ghanaian context' (Adonteng-Kissi 2018: 38).This notwithstanding, the participants also agreed on the potential for children to be harmed by aspects of their work, in ways which were similar to the concerns articulated by the laws.As one noted: I don't like the way my next-door neighbour treats her children.She puts her children to both domestic and economic activities which I believe it's too much for them considering their age.
(Adonteng-Kissi 2018: 40) Comments of the same nature were made by participants who were unfamiliar with the national legislation on children's work and were drawing on the indigenous, traditional or cultural understanding that some jobs may be 'too much' for children and hence harmful.In traditional Ghanaian societies, work was not allocated to children arbitrarily but with due regard to the child's maturity, as indicated by physical stature, capacity, experience and other factors (Twum-Danso 2009;Nukunya 2003;Mensa-Bonsu and Dowuona-Hammond 1995).This view is captured in the many songs, folklore and icons such as the popular Akan proverb: 'the child breaks the shell of a snail and not that of a tortoise'.This proverb teaches that the shell of a snail is easier to break than that of a tortoise and hence children should do things that are appropriate or acceptable to children rather than those fit for adults.
Thus, the divergence between the traditional and legal positions on children's work in Ghana firstly seems to emanate from the moral, political and not always objective judgements of harm, abuse and development and rights that each side attaches to the work conducted by the child.For example, children and families in cocoa-growing and fishing communities have long held that there are activities in these sectors which can be safely performed by children, while for the most part the law and mainstream child labour abolitionist discourses present children's involvement in pathological terms.The second reason for the divergence is because in Western European and North American societies (the sources of Ghana's contemporary children's work legislation), mention of 'child labour' conjures images of children in horrific factory conditions, sweatshops, or massive industrial farm plantations reminiscent of slavery in antebellum Southern USA (Abebe and Bessell 2011).However, children's work in traditional Ghanaian societies and in contemporary times typically occurs in small-scale subsistence agriculture in the family context and in petty trading, fishing and farming or mining and other small-scale contexts rather than industrial spaces.In all these, attention is also paid to capacities, maturities or abilities of the child in question to whom jobs are allocated, mostly postpubescent or young adults rather than those in 'childhood' or 'babyhood' or pre-pubescent stages.
Workers of all ages can experience harm and hazards in the specified sectors, so the point here is not that being a post-pubescent or young adult person takes away the risks.Rather, this is to highlight the fact that in Europe and North America, 'child labour' was mainly understood in terms of the gruelling industrial labour that had to be tackled by declaring such work as unconditionally bad for children and fit exclusively for adults.But this understanding, reality and mode of dealing with the problem does not hold good in traditional Ghanaian histories and realities on 'child labour'.
Traditionally, no jobs are unconditionally denied to children or automatically debarred as being unsafe for them as it was always considered that there are 'light,' 'non-hazardous' or 'child-friendly' aspects to most jobs.Furthermore, allocating these child-friendly aspects of farming, fishing and other jobs to children was deemed a practical means of introducing them to these jobs, progressively increasing their responsibilities as they matured in age or physical stature or gained more experience.Further, many families and communities considered it imperative to impart to children and youth the skills with which they could eventually build a livelihood -be this fishing, farming, petty trading or other jobs (Sackey and Johannesen 2015;Nukunya 2003).Much of the knowledge, skills and insights surrounding these jobs have not been written down; instead, it was and still is encoded and passed down through oral accounts and folklore, or taught through weaving, trade skills, farming practices, craft making and other modes that required hands-on involvement.Sometimes these skills take years to master.
Hence, while classroom-based education is important -right from Ghana's colonial era, which started the dismantling of the traditional informal education system that mainly revolved around work in favour of classroom-based educational practices -warnings were issued that this risks undermining the scope for imparting practical knowledge, history and skills to those children who would benefit from such opportunities (Lord 2011;Kwamena-Poh 1975).Despite advances in the provision of schooling infrastructure and access, it is still the case that formal classroombased education in many areas of the country is inaccessible or of such poor quality that children would rather not attend (Yeboah et al. 2015).Many of those who attend these poor-quality schools are still largely innumerate and illiterate even after completing Junior Secondary School.This challenge is recognised by the NPA II, which requires the Ministry of Education, through the Non-Formal Education (NFE) Division and the GES, to review and implement policies on alternative forms of education, including transitional programmes to mainstream out-of-school children, particularly in the most deprived areas and for children withdrawn from the worst forms of child labour.This was also an aspect of the NPA I objectives.However, given how non-classroom-based schooling or educational provision is generally stigmatised within mainstream child labour and child rights discourses, reaffirmation of this goal in the NPA II is likely to yield only minimal action, if any at all.Indeed, there has not been any tangible programme or project on NPA II objectives up until the time of writing this report, nearly six months before the 2021 expiration date for NPA II.

Possibilities for a more harmonious relationship between traditional and legal positions on work and children's socialisation
This issue is underscored by Badoe and Opoku-Asare's (2014) study of the kente fabric-weaving sector.The authors call for the inclusion of these indigenous practices in the Ghanaian educational system, given their role as founts of knowledge and education for many young people in Akan culture.Using kente motifs (see Figure 1), the researchers demonstrate that this Ghanaian cultural exemplar of indigenous creativity and technology can be effective for facilitating quality teaching and learning of textile design in higher education and formal educational settings because, as they argue: Unlike formal textiles design education that demands drafting of weave structure before onloom weaving, Kente designs simply evolve on the loom according to the weaver's philosophy, creativity and intention for weaving the cloth.This study proved the feasibility of Asante Kente designs serving as an instructional resource for effective teaching and learning of drafting weave structure of motifs on point paper to guide tie-up arrangement and weaving modified versions of Kente designs on the broadloom to sustain design education in textiles.
(Badoe and Opoku-Asare 2014: 52) As Figure 1 shows, the different styles produced by master kente weavers are knowledge repositories of the traditions, cultures and histories of ethnic groups with kente weaving traditions.Hence, besides being a vital life skill that will lead to independence and a means of subsistence for self and family, learning kente weaving served educational purposes also.It taught young people history, philosophy, design, construction and aesthetics, and provided other knowledge acquisition opportunities (Sabutey 2009).Young boys were traditionally taught this skill routinely in kente-weaving communities, as one participant in Boateng and Narayan's (2017)  Thus, there are clear areas of complementarity between traditional sociocultural constructions of childhood and children's work on the one hand, and the new legislation and policy on the other.However, there are also clear areas of divergence and tensions between them, mainly brought about by how laws have been formulated without due regard for the indigenous systems which pre-dated them.These differences and tensions largely operate at the communal or societal level but also occur at a more personal level for working children and their families.For many young people, being able to cater for themselves and help others in the home is seen as an important milestone on their path to maturity and proving themselves to be worthy of respect and responsibility.It is often overlooked that historically (and presently), work was also tied to a young person's self-sufficiency, independence, honour and respect (Okyere 2013;Hilson 2009).In Okyere's (2012)  Furthermore, while there is indeed pervasive cultural permissibility of children's work, it is also the case that traditional childhood work approaches recognise that there are forms of work that can be too onerous or hazardous for a child.The occurrence and persistence of these are usually in the context of socioeconomic constraints.This challenge was squarely recognised by the Ghana National Commission on Children (GNCC) while drafting The Children's Act (1998).Despite acceding to the various ILO Conventions, the GNCC nonetheless stated the following in its background report to the Act: Government documents recognise the inevitability of child labour as a direct result of poverty.As stated in the background report to the Children's Act: 'The committee takes the view that the present economic circumstances do not permit a wholesale ban on child employment and that a law which seeks to eradicate it completely would be unimplementable and unrealistic.What Ghana needs as a developing country is a piece of legislation which would allow children to work but under certain conditions'.(Bruscino 2001: 22) These concerns were as true at the time as they are now, for various aspects of the Act's provisions on child labour remain unfulfilled while successive national child labour preventive efforts have floundered over the past two decades, despite the scale of resources thrown at this issue.The socioeconomic challenge needs to be resolved as a matter of urgency, for it is also a truism that many families whose children are engaged in harmful work aspire to attain for their children the romantic visions of childhood presented to them in media campaigns, NGO and governmental advocacy.These messages do not entirely encounter closed ears and minds, but they fail to galvanise any major response among some audiences because people's socioeconomic lived realities necessitate children's work, regardless of how challenging or hazardous this may be.Often these actors have a much better understanding of these hazards themselves, having as they do first-hand experience of the cuts, aches, pains and other harms they endure from such work.
It is therefore important that NPA II has identified social intervention programmes as one of the most critical issues required in efforts to eliminate or resolve harmful forms of children's work.
Related to this, the paper argues that the country's high dependency on foreign aid, technical guidance and assistance for social intervention programmes and other interventions on children's work is one of the important political dimensions to this issue.It lends legitimacy to critics' concerns that these are foreign impositions or designs, even if the motivations behind these measures may be good and also in step with the country's national development agendas.Ghana's inability to initiate and implement most child rights and social welfare programmes without external support, direction or influence also exemplifies economic and political underdevelopment and thus raises questions as to why this is so.For some, development aid and other 'handouts' given to countries such as Ghana are not necessarily distinguishable from the (sometimes parasitic) loans, bilateral agreements and forced economic reforms (such as structural adjustment) that do not necessarily facilitate the country's development (Kim 2015).As Kim puts it: 'such intervention by donors in the process of Ghanaian policy-making has further challenged state capacity, legitimacy and effectiveness' (ibid.: 1341).
Further, as Stanford (2015) observes, donors themselves need to satisfy the interests, values and incentives of their governments, parliaments, boards and regulators, while also providing expected results to maintain cash flow.As such, some tend to bypass the recipient government's service provision processes and establish their own donor projects, identifying preferred thirdparty domestic and international NGOs to implement development aid projects or intervening directly in the recipient country's policymaking and implementation.All of these do not bode particularly well for the recipient country in terms of developing institutional capacity, having ownership of national development projects and, in some cases, the success of these projects themselves.Against this backdrop, it is argued that fairer trade practices, equalising global political and economic inequalities, and addressing the legacy of historical wrongs such as colonisation (among others) should be the main focus as they largely underpin the inability of Ghana and many other African countries to provide welfare protection to their children and other citizens (Thomas et al. 2011;Herbert 2011).
In We conclude that human or child rights endeavours of this kind are intrinsically political.They occur at the intersection of different ideologies, interests, identities and other factors that determine their direction, the surrounding tussles, the support they enjoy, and their likelihood of being rejected.They also raise sensitive questions about class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, power, colonialism and hegemony.And so, an assumption that the goodness or positive spirit behind a project is selfevident and will of itself win over all stakeholders may be unfounded.We argue that it is of utmost importance that all stakeholders endeavour to carefully consider and understand the multiplicity of opinions and standpoints in children's rights and children's work more broadly, and in Ghana specifically.This includes a willingness to consider ideas and propositions that may appear antithetical to our personal epistemological and moral ethos or those of our organisations.This is especially so with regards to the voices of working children, their families and communities, in whose names it is often said the laws, research studies, advocacy campaigns and other activities take place.The success of projects such as this is very much reliant on being able to sensitively navigate the diverse ideological and political idioms and build alliances with all stakeholders, especially those whose lived experiences all of us want to understand better and positively shape.

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ACHA Okyere, S.; Frimpong Boamah, E.; Asante, F. and Yeboah, T. (2021) Policies and Politics Around Children's Work in Ghana, ACHA Working Paper 8, Brighton: Action on Children's Harmful Work in African Agriculture, IDS, DOI: 10.19088/ACHA.2021.003Introduction 2 Children's work in Ghana: a brief introduction 3 Existing regulatory and legislative frameworks on children's work in Ghana 3.1 Key policies and social interventions aimed at preventing and eliminating child labour 4 Between a rock and a hard place: child rights and regulation of children's work 4.1 Traditional sociocultural constructions of childhood and children's work in Ghana 4.2 Continued permissibility and place for work in Ghanaian children's lives 4.3 Possibilities for a more harmonious relationship between traditional and legal positions on work and children's socialisation 5 Conclusions 5.1 Approaches to childhood and children's work in Ghana: caught between two worlds References Tables

Working Paper 1
Action on Children's Harmful Work in African Agriculture Action on Children's Harmful Work in African Agriculture T +44 (0) 1273 606261 E ids@ids.ac.ukW www.ids.ac.ukT @IDS_UK F facebook.com/idsukT +44 (0) 1273 915841 E a.warmington@ids.ac.ukW www.acha.global It is currently assumed that the majority of children's work in Africa is within the agricultural sector.However, the evidence base is very poor in regard to: the prevalence of children's harmful work in African agriculture; the distribution of children's harmful work across different agricultural value chains, farming systems and agro-ecologies; the effects of different types of value chains and models of value chain coordination on the prevalence of harmful children's work; and the efficacy of different interventions to address harmful children's work.These are the areas that ACHA will address.

Table 2 .
Examples of funded initiatives on child labour and child rights in Ghana

Table 1 .
Children's work targeted for regulation or elimination in Ghana as cocoa farming, fishing, mining and rice farming) have been funded by actors such as the US Department of Labor and USA State Department, the World Cocoa Foundation and the ICI, and with technical assistance from the International Labour Organization/International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (ILO-IPEC 2013).The following sections highlight the key social intervention programmes and other initiatives partly or wholly targeted at the elimination or regulation of prohibited children's work in Ghana over the past decade, and the extent to which these activities are dependent on funding and direction from external development partners.
on to discuss, there is a long-standing critique in the childhood studies and rights literature that these are not 'international standards' per se, but Western-derived norms promoted through Western power and hegemony.Nonetheless, in light of such demands that Ghana conforms to international norms, The Children's Act, 1998 (Act 560), for instance, is a near carbon copy of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC).Both stipulate that 18 years is the boundary between childhood and adulthood.Likewise, the Human Trafficking Act (Act 694) (Government of the Republic of Ghana 2005) is derived from the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children (hereafter referred to as the Palermo Protocol).ILO Conventions No. 138 and No. 182 (such as definitions of hazardous work, ages of entry into employment, hazardous work, etc.) also feature very prominently in sections of The Children's Act on children's labour.Such is the influence of foreign actors in Ghana's national legislative efforts that the country included these provisions in its flagship children's rights legislation even before it had formally ratified ILO Convention No. 138, 4 and before the adoption of ILO Convention No. 182 by the UN General Assembly in 2000.Most of the previous and current direct interventions aimed at eliminating children's work in sectors with a high international profile or visibility (such a National Plan of Action against Child Labour, Phase 1 (NPA I, 2009-2015): This was Ghana's first systematic attempt to prevent and eliminate child labour and the worst forms of child labour (Government of the Republic of Ghana 2009).Among others, its main objectives were to: review, update and enforce the laws; ensure social mobilisation for the respect and protection of children's rights; ensure full implementation of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) policy with priority attention to deprived communities; improve access to post-basic education for children above

Declaration of Joint Action to Support the Implementation of the Harkin-Engel Protocol:
child labour to the barest minimum (at least 10%) by 2021 while laying strong social, policy and institutional foundations for the elimination and prevention of all forms of child labour in the longer term' (Government of the Republic of Ghana 2017b: 27).The main difference is that within NPA II, a figure of 'at least 10%' has been cited to represent the idea of 'barest minimum' within the mission statement.NPA II includes four strategic objectives: b National Plan of Action against Child Labour, Phase 2 (NPA II, 2017-2021): This programme continues NPA I, with the intention of building on its successes, though as already noted, the government's own assessment was that NPA I had underperformed, and the incidence of child labour in Ghana actually went up rather than declined during the NPA I.In reality, then, NPA II seeks to attain what NPA I failed to do.Like its predecessor, NPA II has the overarching objective to: 'reduce The Government of Ghana, 'with the assistance of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) engaged a national consultant to develop a coordinated and comprehensive National Plan of Action to effectively tackle human trafficking in Ghana' (ibid.: 3).The scheme is still ongoing, and no reviews are available as yet.theGhana Education Service (GES) is to seek to further enforce access to education through the FCUBE scheme, as an important aspect of the country's child labour preventive and abolitionist efforts.Ghana's high reliance on foreign aid, technical guidance and direction for virtually all child labour and child rights policies, campaigns and other

Table 2 .
Examples of funded initiatives on child labour and child rights in Ghana scope and success of these initiatives.Development aid in its various forms is rarely awarded without conditions of use, which may or may not result in the judicious use of the funds vis-à-vis the realities on the ground.The law has a lot of problem areas, for example, conflict between the customary law and the principle of the Convention in areas such as marriage.In some areas of the country girls can marry at a younger age.The courts do not register marriages below 18 years but is recognised by the traditional ones.(McCrystal and Manful 2011) Ghana has already undergone significant change in its attitudes, norms and standards since the re-introduction of parliamentary democracy in 1992, which ushered in child rights and children's work legislation.Indeed, this is partly exemplified by the speed and degree to which successive governments and many Ghanaians have adopted new cultural standards on children's upbringing and have committed themselves to promote the same across the country.With these in mind, the arguments herein are not to suggest that every aspect of traditional Ghanaian practices on childhood and children's work holds good today.
. For boys, courage and bravery are seen as signs of masculinity and thus counted as part of the transition and entry to manhood.Hence, expressions such as ne bo ayɛ duru or ne koko ayɛ duru or w'ayɛ / ɔreyɛ barima (he's brave or he's become brave or he's become/ Figure 1.Typical male Asante kente strip all this, what this paper demonstrates is the importance of building consensus given that present approaches to children's work in Ghana are located within two rights discourses and practices.Policies and programmes aimed at preventing hazardous or harmful work should seek a middleground approach or draw on both perspectives to achieve a maximum purchase or acceptance of the programme by stakeholders and thereby accelerate attainment of goals.Failure to build consensus with target communities might unduly penalise already marginalised and disenfranchised people, resulting in antagonism towards the project, governmental or NGO workers, and ultimately resulting in rejection of what may have been well-intentioned interventions.