Making sense of child labour in rural sub-Saharan Africa

I am in the process of revising a paper on child labour in African artisanal mining camps, and find myself seriously struggling. Not because it is something that I cannot do; the paper will be revised, and likely accepted. I just find that there are way too many generalizations about child labour in rural sub-Saharan Africa.

You have, on the one hand, an ILO and supporters calling for a ban on child labour, even in rural areas. The view being espoused by this school is that child labour is ‘bad’, irrespective of where, and the conditions under which, it takes place. Children, proponents argue, should not be working, regardless of the circumstances; rather, they should be in school. On the other hand, you have a group which argues that in rural sub-Saharan Africa, child labour is a part of the culture – that ‘going to farm’ has been, and continues to be, an integral part of rural livelihoods. Both sides are, for the most part, inflexible, unwilling to embrace the other’s views.

After reading the slew of ILO documents on child labour in sub-Saharan Africa, however, you are left with the impression that parents are forcing their kids to work – that they are cruel, and wish to deprive them of their education. In my experience, however, it is quite the opposite: that poor African families make incredible sacrifices to send their children to school, irrespective of what few opportunities may lie at the ‘end of the tunnel’ for high school, college and university graduates. Indeed, many of the first postcolonial African leaders – Nyerere, Nkrumah and even Mugabe before he became senile – preached the value of education. Whether or not it is because the messages of the Fathers of Independence continue to resonate, the rural African family continues to attach enormous value to education.

In many cases, African children work to generate sufficient funds to pay for their school fees. But – and thanks to the ILO – all we, the ignorant public, are provided, is one side of this: conclusions drawn from the terrible images of young children lifting sacks of ore at a mine site, or carrying firewood for miles. Someone needs to tell the ILO that these scenarios are not a result of exploitation, cruelty, or families’ ignorance of school or education. On the contrary, it is the value rural African families place on education which leads to children pursuing work. Rather than condemning the African village for ‘forcing’ their children into work, should we not be praising families for the lengths to which they go in order to ensure that their children attend school? A more logical means of ‘eradicating’ the child labour ‘problem’ in rural sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, would be to support families by providing them with the finances to send children to school; or, in instances where children are ‘breadwinners’, to provide families with the finances equivalent to that which would be lost as a result of removing a child from work.

But the ILO has a policy of not paying for school fees. Alas, we are forced to endure all of these nonsensical claims…

The Overseas Vote

The other day, I was speaking to a Ghanaian man at the train station who could not contain his excitement about the country’s upcoming elections. Ghanaians go to the polls on December 7th in what should produce an overwhelming victory for the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP). But what I found particularly perplexing was how this man could influence the elections: he had not been ‘home’ in over ten years, since the days of Jerry Rawlings (allegedly the reason why he fled the country in the first place). ‘I am voting NPP,’ he told me, ‘because I am a Kumasi man, and because the NPP are doing very good things, unlike the previous NDC [National Democratic Congress] government. So I am voting NPP just like I did last time.’

The allusion to ‘last time’ is, of course, inaccurate: the incumbent president, John Kufuor, only signed into law the Representation of the People Law Bill Amendment on February 24th 2006. During the elections of 2004, therefore, this gentleman would not have been able to vote if he was in Britain. But this law now enables him, and three million more Ghanaians who are resident abroad, to vote in the upcoming election: they will no doubt be converging on their embassies come election time. The opposition NDC, powerless to prevent the bill’s passing at the time, argue that an extension of voting rights to Ghanaians overseas all but assures that the ruling NPP party, which has significant support abroad, of another four years in office. But there is a more significant question worth asking here, which extends beyond the shores of Ghana: should people have a say in who rules a country which they do not live in and/or have no intention of living in?

Of course, the issue of overseas voting is not something endemic to Ghana. We were repeatedly reminded of its occasional absurdity during the US election, when CNN provided footage of scores of Americans piling into US embassies in Argentina, Japan, South Africa, Australia and France to cast their votes. Many of these people work and/or reside permanently abroad but because they were born in America, they are guaranteed a vote that must be cast in the state in which they last resided. In the US, voting rights extend to overseas citizens even though they may no longer own property or have other ties to their last state of residence, and, even if intent to return to that state may be uncertain. This meant that the lady working in the Peace Corps in Nigeria for the next five years was allowed to cast a vote for Barrack Obama, and the cowboy who has been living in the Australian Outback for the last 15 years was able to vote for Senator McCain.

I was recently asked by my father if I was going to vote in the Canadian election (for those of you who are not familiar with this country’s invisible political presence, there was a national election there in October), because, I was told, ‘I was eligible’ to do so. Out of principle, however, I did not: I have not lived there for nearly a decade, so why should I have a say in how my brother, my parents, my friends and the guy at the coffee shop are taxed? Or, whether they can use a cell-phone whilst driving? Or, whether or not they should be fined if they throw their chewing gum on the sidewalk?

Hopefully Ghanaians, and others living abroad, will begin thinking critically about the implications of overseas voting, and also think twice before participating in their ‘national’ elections.

A Quick Rant on the Development Consultancy Debacle…

A recent experience I had at a conference in South Africa effectively underscores the problem with the development ‘consultancy engine’ today. About a month ago, I delivered a pretty passionate talk about how the Kimberley people, by spreading word that Ghana was a potential repository for ‘conflict diamonds’ from neighbouring Cote D’Ivoire, were responsible for the downfall of Akwatia. I explained that their claims were unfounded, and whilst they would later admit the same, the reputation of the town had already been shattered: diminished confidence in Ghanaian product had a ‘ripple’ effect, resulting depressed payments for diamonds throughout the supply chain and, by extension, causing significant hardship. Some two years later, the town is still recovering.

But then I was asked the all-important question: what would I have done differently – that is, how would I have gone about investigating claims that Ghana may be trafficking conflict diamonds? This, admittedly, is something that I had never thought about; and, is the type of question which academics, by nature, cannot answer very well because they have not been trained to do so. Needless to say, I struggled.

Academics excel in carrying out research – to diagnose what problems are, why they occur, where they occur, and why they have happened in the first place. They are also good at filling information gaps: inter alia improving knowledge of the dynamics of a community; through field-testing, providing insight on which technologies can work, and which ones will not; and identifying vulnerable peoples in need of support. This, however, raises yet another an important question: why, then, are so many academics, whose strengths are diagnosing problems, being hired and asked to identify solutions to development-related problems? The result, in most cases, is a recommendation to hold another workshop or seminar to help ‘refocus’.

This underscores the true state of the development consultancy engine today: commissioning the wrong people to do jobs. There are people – external consultants who are more disconnected from theories and books – whose job is to identify solutions. They are asked to draw upon an information base compiled by the academics and other researchers. Now here is the problem with these people: rarely do they use the information provided to them to develop meaningful solutions. Rather, and is evidenced in the mining industry time and time again, the consultants are formulating solutions based upon their own assumptions and educated guesses. This, more often than not, leads to the implementation of ungrounded policy solutions: the implementation of an appropriate piece of equipment and the passing of ineffective laws.

So, to sum up, we have consultants in development who are not taking into consideration research findings whatsoever, yet are forging ahead, prescribing solutions. Moreover, many of these consultants are academics, who though good at generating an information base about pressing problems at hand, are not really good at formulating solutions to these problems.

And we wonder why aid rarely translates into anything meaningful on the ground…

The ‘Eat Well, Live Well Club’

In every African country, there are two groups of people whose lives should be intertwined but are not. On the one hand, you have – and forgive me for being extremely vague but it is simply for clarification purposes – the indigenous populations, whose people simply ‘get on with it’. Apart from exhibiting higher rates of poverty, these populations are little different than those in say, Europe or North America: they have classes, and are comprised of people from different ethnic groups and with different educational backgrounds. On the other hand, you have what I call the ‘Eat Well, Live Well Club’, or the collection of people of the expat variety whose mission is to help the burgeoning groups of impoverished but who seem to be eating well and living well at their expense. This division is more evident in Sierra Leone than in any of the other countries I have worked in.

Based on the couple of days I have spent in Freetown, I find myself questioning more and more what people from multilateral and bilateral agencies actually do in Africa, apart from driving the latest SUV down the potholed roads they are supposed to oversee the paving of and eating at the best restaurants in town. The purpose of the ‘UN mission’ here, for example, is very unclear. I went to an amazing restaurant on the first evening of my stay, which was populated exclusively by UN workers: we could barely turn our small taxi around in the parking lot because of SUV congestion. Here, prices are pretty much on par with London. I was told – and forgive me if I am wrong here – that the UN mission, the aim of which is to ‘peace keep’, will (finally) come to an end in December. But the last time I checked, there was no war here: there has been little need for peacekeeping, particularly the ineffective laissez faire type the UN espouses, in this country for years.

The UK Department for International Development’s (DfID) presence here is also a point of contention. After all, this is an agency being propelled by taxpayer’s money. Would we not, therefore, like to see our monies, earmarked in the name of development, being used to upgrade say, a water treatment plant, or to pave a road in a rural area? This country is Britain’s largest bilateral partner and there is little evidence of any of the hundreds of millions of pounds being spent on aid here being used meaningfully. Forget the fact that some of the roads in Sierra Leone have not been re-paved since the colonial period or that shanty towns still proliferate; rather, every time you open the newspaper, it seems that there is a new DfID tender for security or peacekeeping.

The development agenda is now heavily centred on the issues of good governance and transparency, the main focus being on the institutions and regimes money is being dispensed to. But while we are at it, why not kill two birds with one stone and do an audit of our own agencies? I think that everyone would be shocked to find out what the money is being spent on, although I can tell you right now: SUVs, good food, quality imported liquor and six bedroom houses.

Welcome to the ‘Eat Well, Live Well Club’.

Contributing to the Resource Curse Debate

As an academic who carries out research on mining in developing countries, it is almost impossible to sidestep discussions on the resource curse. In layman’s terms, the resource curse refers to a paradox: that of mineral-rich countries performing poorly economically. The debate centres heavily on the issue of Dutch Disease: that is, the propensity for mineral and oil booms to cause an appreciation in a country’s real exchange rate, which makes the agriculture and manufacturing sectors less competitive in the world market. This, in turn, leads to the financial resources that are normally earmarked for developing these sectors to be used elsewhere (more specifically, for developing further the booming sector) – a move which makes a country more one-dimensional economically. Proponents point to how in developing countries where minerals and/or oil account for the majority of exports, there is little development taking place: that countries such as Angola, Nigeria, Bolivia and the DR Congo have experienced negative per capita GDP growth over the past 10-15 years, and occupy the lowest ranks on the UNDP’s Human Development Index.

There are, of course, those who question the credibility of the arguments put forward by proponents of the resource curse. They point to how the data used have been selected at random, and argue that the cases of Botswana and Chile show how a resource curse-type situation is not necessarily an inevitable outcome in mineral and oil-rich developing states. They also suggest that GDP per capita and the Human Development Index are not very reliable indicators of economic performance.

But what puzzles me is how proponents and skeptics alike have focused overwhelmingly on the macroeconomic element in their discussions. Is it, after all, as clear-cut as is so often depicted? More specifically, is it a case of simply looking at what contributions, say, the gold mining industry is making to Ghana’s economy, and how prioritizing its development is affecting other industrial sectors? Or how prioritizing the extraction of oil in Nigeria has rendered its agricultural and manufacturing economies defunct to the point where they are ‘un-revivable’?

What never ceases to amaze me, however, is how the researchers supposedly analyzing the performance of reformed mineral economies fail to take into account the ‘hidden’ costs of intensified mineral or oil exploitation. For example, how many people have been dislocated as a result of increased gold production in Ghana and Tanzania over the past two decades? And Shell’s increased production of oil in Nigeria? Governments are often forced to bear the long-term costs of the inevitable dislocation and relocation exercises that take place in order to accommodate the influx of foreign-financed large-scale oil extraction and mine development; and, are forced to deal with the community grievances that surface along the way. And, what about the long-term environmental impacts? Who is responsible for financing rehabilitation efforts?

Collectively, these costs comprise something which I refer to as the ‘social dimension of the resource curse’. And, if these issues are taken into consideration, the costs of large-scale oil extraction and mining will certainly be far greater than is assumed.

Rice

Today, I consumed rice for the first time in three weeks. I consider myself a fairly good cook, and I can work wonders with rice. But every time I leave Ghana, I have to go through a period of ‘rice drought’ because I am so sick of eating the stuff.

My aversion of rice develops usually about one week into my trip. This does not bode well for me because in Ghana, an unwillingness to eat rice is practically sin. So I plug on, sitting there, meal after meal, eating chicken or fish with jollof rice, plain rice, fried rice, egg fried rice – the list goes on. You crave greens after a while, and I find that some two months into my stay, my appetite immediately dissipates at the sight of rice. By this point, rice can only be consumed with the assistance of water.

I think my hatred of rice goes beyond the edibility issue: it is mainly psychological. I find myself thinking whilst eating it – thinking too much, in fact. I mainly think about the locations from where it is sourced: Thailand, Japan and America. Why is Ghana and its neighbours importing rice from these countries when it actually grows the stuff, or has the ability to do so? Throughout the country, there are signs pleading for the consumer to buy Ghanaian-produced rice. You go down the streets of Akwatia, where I was about a month ago, and you see bowls of rice being sold, brought in fresh from Accra: not fresh from a Ghanaian farmer’s field but rather fresh off of a boat or a plane.

The answer is simple and obvious: in the global village, countries like Ghana simply do not have a chance when it comes to producing crops like rice. Liberalized markets have flooded the streets of Accra with cheap imported rice. According to OXFAM, the US, Japan and EU provide something like 16 billion US dollars in subsidies to their rice farmers. What, then, happens in Ghana as a result? An inevitable cycle of deterioration: the government gives up on promoting rice farming, rice farmers receive little support in the way of fertilizers and machinery, and the country stops producing rice beyond a subsistence level. I know they are protecting their citizens but why continue to promote a loss industry, when better quality goods can be produced elsewhere and more cheaply? A note to African governments: if developed nations insist on continuing down this path, do not even show up at future ministerial meetings of the Doha Development Round.

I am trying to make sense of world trade. After all, Ghana imports its toothpicks…

Subsistence Groups

It is amazing how development can change the status of subsistence groups so quickly. One minute, you and your group of herdsmen are labeled a ‘subsistence rural population’ who live off of the resources of say, a forest, and are the subject of intense anthropological study, your experiences heavily romanticized. The next minute, you are branded a bunch of ‘illegal loggers’ who are encroaching in the forests belonging to the government. Academics make so much out about the debate between traditional and commercial rights. But is there really any debate to speak of? The reality is, if there is little hope for the aborigines of Australia, whose lands are being ploughed by mining interests, and the First Nations of North America, whose livelihoods have been disrupted by an array of commercial interests – groups based in developed countries with significant NGO representation – what hope is there for the groups in say, the Niger Delta?

The most amazing thing about subsistence groups is how they become the topic of intense criticism for doing nothing - or more specifically, for doing ‘their own thing’. Groups, for example, who have been living in a patch of forest or in a wetland area for centuries, deploying the same hunting, foraging and gathering skills as their parents and their parents before them. It as if there is a multimillion dollar propaganda facility aimed at swaying public opinion about these subsistence groups. As soon as there is a mine that has been sited or patch of forest that is to be harvested, the articles start to be churned out by the hundreds about how these groups are ‘resisting’, are ‘encroaching’ on government lands, or are ‘criminals’.

This is what is happening throughout Ghana, and it extends well beyond the small-scale mining sector, whose operators, despite being branded as criminals, are making significant contributions to national coffers. It includes the Ewe fishing communities of the Bui area, which, despite having been there for a hundred years, are now being pushed aside to make way for the Chinese-funded Bui Hydroelectric Dam. And, the Fante fishermen of the Western Region, who will no doubt be pushed aside and whose interests will be ignored because of newly-discovered oil reserves offshore. Their inevitable resistance will no doubt get the propaganda machine going.

So a warning to all subsistence groups: beware of commercial interests. They could be in your backyard next and soon, you too could also be branded 'a bunch of criminals'.