AActionction on Children’s Harmful Work in AfricanAfrican AgricultureAgriculture Working Paper 5 Children’s harmful work in Ghana’s Lake Volta Fisheries: research needed to move beyond discourses of child trafficking Imogen Bellwood-Howard and Abdulai Abubakari December 2020 1 ACHA Working Paper 5 interventions to address harmful children’s work. About ACHA: These are the areas that ACHA will address. The research informing this Working Paper as well ACHA is a collaborative programme led by the as its publication was made possible thanks to the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Brighton, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office UK. Partners include: (FCDO)-funded research on Action on Children’s Harmful Work in African Agriculture (ACHA). The • University of Ghana, Legon aim of the programme is to build evidence on: • University of Development Studies, Tamale • African Rights Initiative International (ARII) • the forms, drivers, and experiences of children’s • University of Sussex harmful work in African agriculture; and • University of Bath • interventions that are effective in preventing • University of Bristol harm that arises in the course of children’s work. • Fairtrade Foundation • ISEAL Alliance It is currently assumed that the majority of • Rainforest Alliance children’s work in Africa is within the agricultural • Food Systems Planning and Healthy sector. However, the evidence base is very poor in Communities Lab, University at Buffalo regard to: the prevalence of children’s harmful work • International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) in African agriculture; the distribution of children’s • Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH). harmful work across different agricultural value chains, farming systems and agro-ecologies; the effects of different types of value chains and models ACHA is directed by Professor Rachel of value chain coordination on the prevalence of Sabates‑Wheeler ([email protected]) harmful children’s work; and the efficacy of different and Dr James Sumberg. Children work throughout the Lake Volta fisheries About this report: value chain. It is commonly assumed most have been trafficked. Research and advocacy has focused on dangers to young boys harvesting fish, and poverty as a driver, precluding attention to harms experienced by non-trafficked children, girls’ experiences and work-education dynamics. More work is needed on the proportions of children who fish and perform harmful work; structural, ecological and historical contexts; young people’s agency in pursuing fishing work; and why attention to trafficking dominates. This report has been funded with UK aid from the Acknowledgements: UK government (FCDO). The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of IDS or the UK government. Bellwood-Howard, I. and Abubakari, A. (2020) Suggested citation: Children’s Harmful Work in Ghana’s Lake Volta Fisheries: Research Needed to Move Beyond Discourses of Child Trafficking, ACHA Working Paper 5, Brighton: Action on Children’s Harmful Work in African Agriculture, IDS, DOI: 10.19088/ACHA.2020.004 © Institute of Development Studies 2020 ISBN: 978-1-78118-702-9 Copyright DOI: 10.19088/ACHA.2020.004 This is an Open Access paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated. 2 ACHA Working Paper 5 Contents 1 Introduction 5 1.1 Working paper objective and methods 5 1.2 Historical, economic and labour context of fishing around Lake Volta 7 1.3 Fishing on Lake Volta, its governance and labour relations 8 2 Children’s work in fisheries 8 2.1 Tasks children perform 8 2.2 Prevalence of children’s work and harmful work 9 2.3 Trends in demand and availability of child workers 10 2.4 Children’s work and harm 10 2.5 Organisation and terms of children’s work 11 2.6 Gender and social difference 13 3 Drivers of children’s work and harm in fisheries 14 3.1 Poverty and its historical components 14 4 Discourses and policy 15 4.1 Discourses 15 4.2 Policy, practice and key stakeholders 17 5 Dynamics of children’s work and harm in fisheries 19 5.1 Work and school 19 5.2 Ethno-professional and migrant identities 20 5.3 Relative harm when working with parents, family and strangers at home and away 20 5.4 Children’s own motivations and agency 21 5.5 Seasonality and the nature of fishing 21 5.6 Proposed solutions to different problems – rescues and market structures 21 Children’s harmful work in Ghana’s Lake Volta Fisheries: research needed to move beyond discourses of child trafficking 3 6 Conclusions 22 6.1 Research questions 22 6.2 Suggested fieldwork 23 6.2.1 Qualitative 23 6.2.2 Quantitative 24 6.2.3 Contingency plans due to coronavirus movement restrictions 24 References 25 Figures and tables Figure 1. Map of Lake Volta in Ghana 7 Table 1. Stakeholders encountered during reconnaissance visit 6 Table 2. Forms of harm experienced by children working in fisheries 11 Table 3. Data on reasons for moving, from a 2003 survey of working migrant children 16 Table 4. Policy actions relevant to children working in Ghanaian fisheries 17 Table 5. Key actors, stakeholder groups and organisations 18 Table 6. Proposed communities for initial qualitative data collection 24 Author notes Abdulai Abubakari is a sociologist by training with several years’ experience in community development, farmer-herder conflicts, the impact of climate Imogen Bellwood-Howard’s research has focused on sustainable agriculture change on livestock and civil society participation in education. He is a and food systems, largely in rural and urban West Africa. She has been at research assistant on the Action on Children’s Harmful Work in African the Institute of Development Studies since 2017, where she has worked Agriculture (ACHA) programme. Abdulai is a research fellow and director of on projects concerned with agricultural resource use, commercialisation Institute for Interdisciplinary Research and Consultancy Services, University and research funding in Africa. In previous academic roles, she has focused for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana. Before becoming director, he on the social embeddedness of agricultural markets and city-region food served as coordinator of postgraduate programmes, coordinator of research systems, and sustainable soil management. Imogen’s interdisciplinary and and conferences and a member of the graduate school board. Recently, mixed methods research approach draws on environmental geography, with his research focus has been on farmer-herder relations, the role of non- influences from agroecology, socioecological systems thinking, science and state actors in basic education service delivery, chieftaincy and traditional technology studies, political ecology and practice theory. institutions in northern Ghana. 4 ACHA Working Paper 5 1 Introduction Children’s work in Ghana’s Lake Volta fisheries, Furthermore, there is a need to address the as in agriculture and other productive and disconnect between the literature on children’s extractive activities, has a long history, takes work in fisheries and that in other sectors, where various forms and provokes controversy. Such forms of work and migration other than trafficking work can be helpful, harmful, or a mixture of seem to play a role: if trafficking dominates the both for a given child or household. Considering sector to the extent suggested by the fisheries the history of children’s work-related mobility literature (e.g. Iversen 2006; Tengey and Oguaah in West Africa, some academic sources have 2002), why does this sector differ from others? problematised a discourse largely focused on If other forms of migration are in fact present in trafficking. Nevertheless, this remains the dominant this sector, what are the reasons for, and effects presentation of children’s work in the Lake Volta of, a dominant focus on child trafficking: has fisheries among key local stakeholders, as well this diverted attention from the harms that non- as in the popular media, academic and advocacy trafficked children are exposed to, and differences literature. This discourse may have diverted between migrant and local children? In all these attention from other dimensions of children’s work investigations greater awareness of the historical in Lake Volta’s fisheries, including the exposure of and structural dimensions of child labour and its autonomous and other migrant and home-working mobility would be helpful. children to harm, and the relative advantages and trade-offs associated with children’s work. Contemporary children’s work in the Lake Volta fisheries is part of longer-term patterns of mobility and is performed in diverse circumstances involving 1.1 Working paper objective and complex conditions. Some children have indeed methods been trafficked, but it is hard to say precisely what proportion, because others work with parents, This is a scoping paper that explores the current neighbours, strangers or foster carers under a state of knowledge and contemporary discourse to range of different terms and conditions. Some earn do with children’s work in the fisheries value chain cash or in-kind benefits or opportunities through around Lake Volta. It will identify knowledge gaps working. At the same time, they may be exposed to and outline priority novel research questions that reversible or irreversible harms, from