It's very sad seeing children working on farms while their colleagues of same age go sit in classrooms learning but the big QUESTION is CAN CHILD LABOR IN AGRICULTURE BE STOPPED?
It is very challenging addressing this issue because expert will see it as an abuse to children or perhaps the children are been denied education and rather used as labor on farms by their parents, relations or some unkind humans taking advantage of the vulnerability of some children but the issues are so much to deal with.
In rural communities it is common seeing kids going to work on farms on weekends and some too go to the farms to work everyday after close of school: this isn't child abuse or their parents don't love them much to subject them to such responsibilities, the issue is that the children nor their parents or relations have no choice because everyone's efforts are needed to help on the farm that feeds the family. It will interest as all to know that most rural folks bring forth lots of children so that they can help boost the Agricultural human resources of the family. Some children are orphans and if they don't work on the farms, they will be denied food by their relations and those that are desolate will starve if they ignore the only chance to survive.
LET ME USE MYSELF AS AN EXAMPLE
I was born into a family whose main occupation is subsistence farming with a financially weak background in the northern part of Ghana. Growing up in such a rural community among other several children of an extended family, I realized one thing was key in this life that will enable me to change the situation of my life, i believed education was the weapon, even when there was no one to pay my school fees. As early as 11 years I was working on people's farms to fend for myself, when they paid me I used the money to buy exercise books for and food for school because no one asked me to go to school, I took myself to school and therefore no one was going to take the burden of taking care of my education, I did this and was able to take care of myself till I got enrolled in secondary school, I was in the boarding house and couldn't work again and that left me without money in school, but since the school was feeding students I was some nphow okay. During vacation I never went back home to the north, I took to the streets of Agbogbloshie a suburb of Accra, where I engaged myself in selling yams in the market to help me save some amount for my tertiary education after my senior high school. After secondary school, I went to stay with an uncle of mine in Cape Coast and carry out that business, this took me a year after completing my senior high school education to gather some money for my undergraduate education and my uncle gave me some financial support to raise the full amount needed because I and an effort and he was very impressed with my determination. While in the University, I had to skip lectures sometimes so that I can go and take yams from farmers and sell and raise funds for my upkeep and this affected my academic performance badly. When I got to my third year in the university, my uncle who was my only source of support got involved in an accident that got him paralyzed. Things became very tough because I had to fend for myself all alone again, I struggled a lot and he died. I continued the business and I was able to graduate from the University. This the faith of a lot of my kind such that without been used as Agricultural labor we will have no no education, or might not even survive to tell the story.
Child labor in Agriculture can only be ended if there's a way of putting money in the pockets of every desolate child..........
Child labor in Agriculture can only be ended if we can have a world without hunger and poverty........
Thank you.
Ms. Kamasa Dorothy