The issue of child labour: Are we missing the point?
Children are a very treasured part of every society because they determine whether a community or country has a future or not.
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Many communities, as well as countries, therefore, make laws that protect and seek the welfare of their children and ensure that they grow into responsible adults to take over from their parents and leaders.
It is because of the importance of children in every family that many go to every length just to have children. In Africa, especially, both the extended family and society put pressure on newlyweds to bear children when they delay in producing offspring because of the value put on children in a family.
From infancy, many parents teach their children the vocations they (parents) are engaged in to make ends meet. It is, therefore, not strange that most of the time children end up practising the same vocations or doing the same jobs that their parents did to cater for the children when they were growing up.
Unfortunately, the assistance that children give to their parents in their vocations is being counted as child labour in some instances.
Apart from enabling the children to put their idle time to good use, thereby protecting them from harm, helping parents also inculcates in children a sense of responsibility as they grow into adulthood.
Of course, the Daily Graphic is not in any way justifying child labour in any form, but we believe that there must be a clear distinction between helping out with a family venture or business and doing the same work to receive any form of remuneration to cater for the family’s financial needs.
We join the government’s call for more stakeholder collaboration to end child labour to safeguard the future of all Ghanaian children.
We believe that on no account must a child below 18 years be made to undertake any form of work which is harmful to his or her physical and mental development to supplement the family income and also deprive him or her of his or her childhood potential and dignity.
We urge all stakeholders, including the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, to effectively deal with the issue of child labour by first making a clear distinction between the assistance children offer their parents during school vacation or in their leisure time and forcing the children to undertake commercial activities to support their families financially when it is not in their place to do so.
The Daily Graphic also believes that we need to fine-tune our social welfare policy as a country to prevent conditions that give rise to child labour.
Parents who fail to cater for their children but instead put them in harm’s way by making them work to fend for themselves, their siblings and even parents must be dealt with according to the law.
We also urge the government to look at our own circumstances before appending its signature to international conventions and protocols just because we want to beat our chest for being the first to do so.
Many so-called advanced economies will not sign international protocols that contradict their national laws.
The Daily Graphic calls on the government and all stakeholders to look at our own circumstances and do away with inimical practices, not necessarily because the international community says so but because those practices retard our progress.
