Child Labor In James Kofi Annan's Fishing Villages

“For a small sum of money, James Kofi Annan’s father handed him over to a child trafficker when he was just six years old. Born into a family in Ghana with 12 children, there was no money for school uniforms and books. So instead of gaining an academic education, James would learn the painful lessons of the enslaved, in Ghana’s fishing villages.”

In Ghana, many children end up in slave labor that includes the worst forms of child labor with most of them working in the agricultural or fishing industries. Many children are enslaved in Ghana’s Lake Volta Fishing Industry. Children as young as four, perform tasks such as deep sea fishing, lagoon fishing, and lake fishing and are expected to work for 17 hours a day, enduring constant physical and emotional abuse. Children are used as a cheap form of labor not only for saving money but also for being able to use tiny fingers and bodies for catching fish and keeping more on a fishing boat at a time. “The children work long hours for no pay; do not attend school, are often malnourished, sleep deprived, and treated abusively.” If a net gets snagged on something underwater, children are “forced to dive underwater to free the net” this exposes them to water-borne diseases and drowning.”

“60% of the world’s 215 million child laborers work in the agricultural sector (agriculture, livestock-raising, forestry, and fishing). In Ghana one in six children aged six to 14 are involved in child labor. 88% work on farms and 2.3% work in fishing.” Although a small portion of children in Ghana are sent to work in the fishing sector of agricultural work it is clearly creating a problem. A majority of the children brought to work at Lake Volta are trafficked from surrounding areas in Ghana. Poor famili...

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...s work. However, these standards are often ignored and the practice of younger children working is a commonly recognized in Ghana. Other organizations such as the Internation Organization for Migration and Challenging Heights have devoted themselves to liberating, rescuing, and rehabilitating children who have been trafficked in Lake Volta’s fishing industry. Since 2002, over 1,200 children have been rescued by these organizations. Yet the liberators meet many obstacles when trying to rescue trafficked children. For instance, many children are forced to lie to authorities and rescuers and say that they are attending school rather than working. Many of these children are hidden and moved to new locations when liberators come seeking justice. These factors among others cause great difficulties in trying to stop child labor in Lake Volta and surrounding areas.