7 - The Plurality of Childhoods and the Significance for Rights Discourses: An Exploration of Child Duty and Work Against a Backdrop of Social Inequality

Summary

Introduction

Embedded in understandings and indeed, accounts, of childhoods in Ghana and in other contexts in Africa has been the notion of children's duties or responsibilities, which primarily manifest themselves not only in the behaviour expected of children within the context of the family, but also through the work tasks they undertake. Some of this work in which children engage generates income for themselves or their family alongside – or independent of – other household members. This particular aspect of the work children undertake has generated much academic and policy attention over recent decades due to its perceived hazards as well as its implications for children's development, wellbeing and formal educational trajectories. Abebe sets out the crux of dominant policy concerns about child work well when he states:

Accordingly, children's participation in work – although paradoxically amplified by and increasingly subordinated to the global political economy – is seen as a hindrance to achieving children's rights and realizing the millennium development goals such as ensuring the universal enrolment of children in schools by 2015 (United Nations, 2007). Article 32 of the CRC emphasizes the right of children to be prevented from ‘performing any work that is likely to interfere with their education’, while Article 28 expresses the conviction that children have the right to be educated and that primary schools should be made free and compulsory for that purpose. What these Articles suggest is a denigration of work contrasted with an idealisation of the potential of schooling (Ansell, 2005). By claiming that the state knows what is in the best interests of the child, the CRC not only diverts attention away from families and communities who sustain children's protection and provision (however refracted), it also denies children the right to benefits arising from work appropriate to their age. (Abebe, 2013: 86)

While it is this paid work in which children engage that has received the bulk of policy and academic attention, children also undertake other forms of work that ensure the maintenance of the household – cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and utensils, yard work, taking care of siblings, running errands, and working on the farm to grow produce to feed the family.