assignment

Child Labour in West Africa:
Different Work – Different

Vulnerabilities

Morten Bøås and Anne Hatløy*

ABSTRACT

Based on data from four different surveys – street children in Accra, Ghana;
street children in Bamako, Mali; children and youth in alluvial-diamond pro-
duction in Kono district, Sierra Leone; and war-affected children in Voinja-
ma district, Liberia – this article analyzes how children and youth seek to use
different economic strategies to shape their lives. In each of these cases, child
labour is a consequence of poverty, steep school fees and the family need for
the income that the children can earn. The results show school attendance
among the children is low, and lowest among the street children and highest
among the children in Voinjama who have recently returned after the war.
All the children in this article live under difficult circumstances, but those
working in the mines, or living a life as street children are particularly prone
to respectively physical and mental stress. The type of labour performed in
the alluvial diamond mines is extremely hard and repetitive. The life of a
street child in West Africa is also very hard. It is a life that only the boldest
and bravest will endure. The most fortunate ones are the returnee children in
Voinjama. They have survived the Liberian civil war with their family or
family-related networks intact. The children in the study are not just passive
victims of structures and actions they do not comprehend, but also people
who try to adapt to a situation where education is less an option than it used
to be. Faced with these constraints the children, either as miners or as street
children, try to assume responsibility for their lives by the choice of the eco-
nomic strategy that they are currently using. The study also indicates that
efforts to support these groups should pay more attention to their lived reali-
ties of work and migration.

* Fafo – Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo, Norway.

� 2008 The Authors
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Journal Compilation � 2008 IOM
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 46 (3) 2008
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985

INTRODUCTION

Since the dawn of the modern state in West Africa, the children and youth
in this part of the world have either tried to secure their future through the
educational system, or by combining some basic education with family
employment, mainly in the agricultural sector. However, as most of these
states came to experience a combination of an economic and a social crisis
(Richards, 1996; Chabal and Daloz, 1999; Ellis, 1999; Mbembe, 2001;
Boone, 2003; Keen, 2005), these two strategies suddenly became less rele-
vant for a large number of children and youth all over West Africa.

We believe that the fact that Africa has the highest rate of economically
active children in the world is related to the crisis of the African state.
Child labour is therefore undoubtedly an important issue in West
Africa. However, apart from the attention this subject has received from
a few Africanist scholars (Bass, 2004; Grier, 2004; Grier, 2005; Kielland
and Tovo, 2006), it has been dominated by reports from international
and non-governmental organizations, which tend to see working chil-
dren as passive victims of exploitation and the victims of objectification
by those in power and authority.

This article, which is embedded within a broader debate about children
and youth in Africa (de Honwana and Boeck, 2005; Abbink and Van Kes-
sel, 2005; Bøås, 2004; Utas, 2003; Abdullah, 1998; Richards, 1996), ana-
lyzes how children and youth seek to use different economic strategies to
shape their lives. In this article we use empirical data from four different
surveys – street children in Accra, Ghana; street children in Bamako,
Mali; children and youths in alluvial-diamond production in Kono dis-
trict, Sierra Leone; and war-affected children in Voinjama district in Libe-
ria – to analyze how children try to find alternative coping strategies in the
economic sector (see Hatløy and Huser, 2005; Bøås and Hatløy, 2006a;
and Bøås and Hatløy, 2006b). The children in our studies represent differ-
ent types of adaptation to alternative coping strategies, which enable these
children, and youths to negotiate a situation in which education no longer
can be taken for granted. These children are not necessarily drawn into
economic activities because they are being exploited, but because it is seen
as a better survival strategy than the other alternatives available.

This article will therefore analyze the living conditions of these four dif-
ferent groups of children, what choices they have made, and how these
deliberations are influenced by the constraints that they are facing. The

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article focuses on their level of education, family background, current
occupation, and aspirations for the future.

METHODS

The four case studies were conducted with different sampling methods,
based on the different character of the studied subjects. In Bamako, a
city with relatively few street children, the main results are based on
data collected through the sampling technique Capture-Recapture (CR),
and additional information was also collected through Respondent Dri-
ven Sampling (RDS). Both methods are designed to capture hidden, rare
or elusive populations. In Accra and Kono, RDS was chosen as the
sampling method because the subjects were characterized as hidden
population groups. CR was not found to be an effective method in these
cases, due to the huge number of children working in diamond-related
activities in Kono, or living as street children in Accra. In Voinjama the
study focused on the economic activities of children ten to 18 years of
age, and a household sampling procedure was chosen to select the chil-
dren. The reasons why these particular methods were chosen for each
particular case are explained below.

The aim of CR is to estimate the size of a population for which
there exists no sample frame, and to produce data that are represen-
tative for this population (Jensen and Pearson, 2002). This sampling
technique is based on studies conducted in wildlife sciences, dating
back to 1889 when C.G.J. Peterson introduced the method for esti-
mating mortality rates in fish in Limfjorden in Denmark. The first
study that used this method for counting a population was conducted
by Dahl, who counted trout in Norway in 1917 (LeCren, 1965). The
researcher captures a number of fish, for example, 100 from a fish-
pond, paints their tails blue, and puts them back into the fishpond
again. The following day or week, the researcher recaptures a number
of fish again, for example, 110, from the same pond and counts the
fish with blue tails. If 15 of the recaptured fish have blue tails, the
estimated number of fish in the pond is: 100*110 ⁄ 15 = 733 fish. To
get a more robust estimate, the recapture may be conducted several
times. The method has been brought from the wildlife sciences to
human sciences, and has been used for counting many types of hid-
den populations ranging from street children in Brazil (Gurgel et al.,
2004), to homeless in Westminster (Fisher et al., 1994), alcohol and
drug users (Gemmel et al., 2004, Corrao et al., 2000), AIDS cases in

5Child labour in West Africa

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France (Bernillon et al., 2000), prostitutes in Norway (Brunovskis and
Tyldum, 2004), lesbians in the United States (Aaron et al., 2003), and
traffic-related injuries in Scotland (Morrison and Stone, 2000). The
CR method was here used for the study of street children in Bamako
in July 2004 (see Hatløy and Huser, 2005).

RDS is based on a dual incentive structure, in which respondents are
rewarded for being interviewed and for recruiting new respondents.
RDS is a chain referral sampling technique used when the targeted pop-
ulation can be defined as a ‘‘hidden population’’: This means that no
sample frame exists and ⁄ or a frame would be impossible to establish, as
the size and boundaries of the population are unknown. The sampling
begins with a set of initial participants from the target group who serve
as ‘‘seeds’’ and the sampling expands in waves. Each of the recruitments
is therefore a link in a recruitment chain. However, to reduce the prob-
lem of masking, when respondents protect their peers by not referring
them, the new recruits are asked to recruit new respondents into the
study themselves. This is different from other chain-referral sampling
where the respondents are asked to identify new respondents. The sam-
ple collection converges to equilibrium within a limited number of
waves, independent of the initial recruits. Salganik and Heckathorn
(2004) argue that it is real people connected to a network of relation-
ships who make up hidden populations. The main idea behind the esti-
mation is that the estimates do not come from the sample proportions.
The sample is used to make estimates about the network connecting the
population (Heckthorn, 1997; Heckathorn and Jeffri, 2001; Heckathorn
et al., 2001; Heckthorn, 2002; Heckathorn and Rosenstein, 2002; Heck-
thorn, 2005; Wang et al., 2005). RDS was employed for the study of
street children in Accra in October 2004, and the children working with
diamonds and diamond-related activities in Kono in April 2005. It was
partly implemented in the work among street children in Bamako. In
the latter case this method was used in combination with CR (see Bøås
and Hatløy, 2006a, Hatløy and Huser, 2005).

In Liberia the study was carried out in Electoral District 3,

Voinjama

District in Lofa County, in November 2005. Random numbers of house-
holds were selected in each village. In each of the selected households a
household member, primarily the head of the household, was inter-
viewed about the various members of the household. This part of the
survey was concerned with gathering information on age, sex, and the
relation to the head of the household. In households that included mem-
bers between ten and 18 years of age, one of the children was chosen

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for a more extensive interview. This interview was conducted with the
use of a questionnaire that was concerned with the child’s background,
education, skills levels, wartime experiences and current activities. A
Kish table was used to randomly select the child for an interview. All
villages within the selection area were visited, and the number of inter-
views in each village was determined as a proportion of population size,
and the actual households to be interviewed were selected based on a
pre-determined pattern of random walking. In all four of the cases stud-
ied, a specially designed questionnaire was used. Local fieldworkers,
trained by the research team, conducted the interviews in the local
language. The average interview time was between ten and 15 minutes.

The children in all of the four case studies directly answered the question-
naires. One may question the validity of the answers obtained from
research with extremely exposed groups like the street children. However,
this seemed to work well for the study population in these studies. In
Bamako, both CR and RDS were used, and many of the questions were
similar in the two questionnaires. Similar results were revealed in both
methods. Control questions were conducted in all questionnaires; fake
answers could easily be detected. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, in-depth
interviews were conducted with a sub-sample of the children, and quanti-
tative and qualitative information complemented each other. On this
basis, we believe that the responses given by the children are fairly reliable.

WHO ARE THE CHILDREN?

The study populations in the various studies were street children in
Bamako, the capital of Mali; Accra, the capital of Ghana; children
working in the diamond sector in Kono district in Sierra Leone; and
newly-returned internally displaced persons (IDP) and refugee children
in Voinjama district in Liberia. In all of the cases the children were
below 18 years of age. For the street children and in Kono, there was
no lower age limit, while in Voinjama, only children from ten to
18 years of age were included for analysis.

The definition for ‘‘street children’’ in this article, are the ‘‘children of
the street’’ – children with no real home to go to (UNICEF, 1984). Not
included in this definition are children belonging to ‘‘street families’’, as
when children sleep in the streets together with their parents or other
guards. These children live under some form of adult protection and are
therefore not living on their own. The definition of street children that

7Child labour in West Africa

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we employ also does not include beggars under the age of 18 who spend
most of the daytime in the streets, but are attached to a marabout (Kor-
anic teacher) or their parents ⁄ tutors. A third borderline group that is
not included in the definition are the children who slept in a reception
centre the previous night (Hatløy and Huser, 2005).

Kono district has a long history of diamond mining, starting in the
1930s. It was hard hit by the 1991–2002 civil war, because whoever con-
trolled the area also controlled the diamonds. Young men are involved
in mining activities, generally from age 14 and above. Few women and
young girls work directly as miners; however, women and young girls
and boys are involved in the support sectors surrounding the diamond
site. This involves petty traders, water carriers and food providers (Bøås
and Hatløy, 2006a; Kielland and Tovo, 2006).

In post-war Liberia, Lofa County is one of main return areas for refu-
gees and IDP’s. Nearly the whole population in Lofa County was forced

Street children

Diamond sector

Newly returned IDPs

FIGURE 1

MAP OF WEST AFRICA WITH INDICATIONS OF THE CASE STUDIES’ LOCATIONS

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Journal Compilation � 2008 IOM

to flee during the war, either to Guinea, or to other areas in Liberia,
mainly to camps around Monrovia and in Bong County (Bøås and
Hatløy, 2006b). These people are now returning home. In Lofa the pop-
ulation size increased by 46 per cent from July to the end of October
2004. In Voinjama District, the population increased from about 20,00

to 30,000 during these five months. From June 2004 to October the
same year, the number of households increased from 3,300 to 7,200
(Golightly, 2004a; Golightly, 2004b). The returnees include both Man-
dingo refugees returning from Guinea and IDPs, mainly Loma and
Mandingo, returning from Monrovia.

Common for these four case studies is that they involve a lot of children
who have been through a migration process: the street children have
moved away from their families and out into the street; many of the
children working with diamonds have left their families to come and
search for an income; all of the post-war children in Voinjama have
migrated, either alone or together with their families due to the war.

As Table 1 shows, the gender distribution varies a lot in the four cases:
In Bamako, nearly all the street children were boys (96%), while in
Accra three out of four street children were girls. The children on the
streets of Bamako were younger than the ones in Accra. Nevertheless, in

TABLE 1

AGE DISTRIBUTION IN PERCENT BY GENDER AND SITE

Bamako Accra Kono Voinjama

Gender Male 96 26 73 56
Female 4 74 27 44

Age boys 9-May 2 2 13 b

13-Oct 35 18 40 56
14–17 63 80 46 45

Age girls 9-May
a

2 18
b

13-Oct
a

24 55 53
14–17

a
74 26 47

Status parents Both alive 73 88 65 81
Father dead 13 6 12 14
Mother dead 5 4 7 2
Both dead 9 2 16 3

Contact with parents Living together 0 0 48 76
Regular contact 60 73 16 14
No ⁄ rare contact 40 27 35 11

N = 217 1321 618 479

a Too few cases to calculate percentage.
b Not included in the sample.

9Child labour in West Africa

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both places a smaller group of children were under 10 years of age (two
percent). In Bamako 35 per cent of the boys were in the age group 10–
13, while this was the case for 18 per cent of the boys and 24 per cent
of the girls in Accra. Among the children working with diamonds in
Kono, three out of four were boys, as in Table 1.

However, the girls who work with diamonds were younger than the
boys, as many as 18 per cent of the girls were under ten years of age,
while 13 per cent of the boys were so young. One of the reasons for this
is the division of tasks – the diamond digging itself is hard and repetitive
physical labour, and one therefore needs the strength that comes with a
certain age to do a useful job in the diamond pits. This means that in
order to get employment in the diamond pits you need to be at least
14 years old, and you must be a boy. This is simply not the kind of
labour that a small child can conduct in an efficient manner, and in
Sierra Leone this work is not considered a job for girls. The girls and
the younger boys working in the diamond-mining areas are therefore
mainly doing work related to support functions, such as cooking food,
bringing water, and doing petty trade (Bøås and Hatløy, 2006a).

The children in Voinjama are, as the table shows, more equally distrib-
uted both according to age and gender, with a few more boys than girls
(56% vs. 44%). These children are the children who have returned to
Voinjama city or to the rural areas in Voinjama with parents or rela-
tives. One could have expected that there would have been more girls
than boys, as the boys more likely had been involved in the armed
groups, but this was not the case in our study.

Regarding the contact with their biological parents, Table 1 shows that
the majority of the children claimed to have their parents alive. In
Accra, only 2 per cent of the street children were orphans, and in
Bamako 9 per cent of the children said they have lost both parents. This
may seem like a high number, but loss of parents cannot be the main
factor for the children to go into the streets. In Bamako as many as 73
per cent of the children claimed to have both their parents alive, and in
Accra this was the case for 88 per cent of the children. This means that
most of the street children were not orphans.

Sierra Leone and Liberia are both post-war countries – and the popula-
tion has suffered through years of civil wars. The number of orphans in
Sierra Leone is far the highest in the four cases: 16 per cent have lost
both parents and only 65 per cent have both parents alive. Twenty-eight

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per cent of the children in the diamond sector have lost the father, and
twenty-three per cent have lost the mother. In Voinjama one could have
expected the situation to be similar to the one in Sierra Leone – here the
war is even closer in time, and it was not in any way less brutal than in
Sierra Leone. However, as Table 1 shows, 81 per cent of the children in
Voinjama have both parents alive, and ‘‘only’’ 3 per cent have lost both
parents. By far the most important thing to keep in mind, is that the
children interviewed in Voinjama are the ones who have newly returned
either from Guinea or from elsewhere in Liberia. These children have
caretakers who provided for their return, whereas the ones who are on
their own might not yet have returned. There is simply not anything for
them to return to. It is only children who are part of closely knitted
groups, such as a family, who can carve out a living in the immediate
post-war situation in a rural area such as Voinjama. The children who
have returned are therefore the ones living together with their parents
(76%), or who have regular contact with their parents. For the diamond
children in Kono, the situation is different; 51 per cent of these children
are not living with their parents, and more than half of them were not
born in Kono district (see Bøås and Hatløy, 2006a).

What all the four groups of children have in common is that they
belong to, what some would call, vulnerable groups of children. They
are either living in the streets; living outside their ordinary family net-
work, often under harsh conditions; or they are newly returned to their
home communities.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING?

The most common economic activity in West Africa is agriculture. How-
ever, the majority of children in our four case studies have to a large
extent made other choices for work.

The street children have left the countryside and travelled to urban areas
to search for opportunities – in Bamako less than 20 per cent of the
street children originated from Bamako, in Accra only 3 per cent origi-
nated from Accra. These children have, voluntarily or by force, left their
homes in search of new activities. This move is often economically moti-
vated. Girls in Accra said that they needed money to prepare their
trousseau (i.e. bridal-chest), others said they needed money to help their
families. Other reasons were that some children had left in order to
escape an unwanted situation, either due to being badly treated in their

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homes, or in order to run away from a Koran school, or that they
sometimes simply went for the adventure. To survive as a street child,
one needs to be strong and brave; the children who live in the streets of
Bamako and Accra are such children. The street children in Bamako are
mainly begging and many of them have a background as Koran school-
boys. They easily blend in the street picture, which has many young
boys begging as part of their Koran school education. In Accra, the
main activity for the street children is to carry goods. They are called
the Kaya bola. These are seen all over Accra, in particular girls with
washbasins on their heads. They are willing to carry whatever is
demanded of them for a few cedis. However, in addition to these two
main activities, the street children do whatever small income-generating
activities that may turn up, such as shoe shining, car-window washing,
truck pushing, selling small items, collecting garbage etc. Very few
report that they are involved in criminal activities such as theft or rob-
beries or are selling sex (Hatløy and Huser, 2005). The children are
rather effective in their income-generating activities; as Table 2 shows,
93 per cent of the street children in Bamako and 96 per cent in Accra,
have reported an income. The median daily income was around a dollar.
In Ghana the average household expenditure is between US$ 11 and
US$ 56 per month; in Mali 73 per cent of the population live on less
than a dollar a day (UNICEF, 2004; Ghana Statistical Service, 2003).

The children connected to the diamond activities in Kono are divided
into three different categories:

• Direct workers, meaning the ones directly digging and washing
for the diamonds;

TABLE 2

PERCENTAGE OF CHILDREN WITHOUT INCOME, AND MEDIAN INCOME FOR

CHILDREN WITH INCOME

Bamako Accra Kono Voinjama

No economic activities (percent) a a a 37
No income (percent) 7 4 40 17
Median daily income (USD) for
children with an income

0.9 1.2 1 1.5

N= 217 1321 618 479

a
The inclusion criteria for the children in Bamako, Accra and Kono to the survey, was
that they had economic activities.

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• Support functions, the ones who prepare food, provide water, run
errands, and carry out smaller tasks that are available; and

• Petty trade, the ones who work at the mining sites selling basic com-
modities like biscuits, cigarettes, soft drinks etc., often for an older
family member or on commission for a more established trader.

Alluvial diamond mining is almost entirely non-industrial. The nature of
the work and the tools used are similar to non-industrial agricultural
work. What separates this work from agricultural and other economic
activities in Sierra Leone is the iterated repetition of heavy work tasks.
In other words, it is not the tools themselves that are dangerous, but the
very nature of the work. If carried out every single day, month after
month, year after year, this kind of work quickly breaks the body down.
People do not appear to grow ‘‘old’’ in this kind of work; indeed, it is
extremely rare to see elderly people mining, as people above 30 years of
age generally cannot cope for long with the bucket and shovel work of
alluvial diamond mining. Many of the miners complain about pain in
the back and chest.

The direct workers in the mining sector are typically boys who have
reached at least 14 years of age. They carry out heavy manual labour
that is highly specialized and extremely repetitive. This explains the
high frequency of back and chest pain in this group, as well as the
high frequency of reported injuries. The support workers are younger
than the miners, and often involved in helping their mothers (or other
female relatives) to supply the miners with food and beverage. In
addition, this group carries out errands and minor tasks related to
mining. Because they are by and large confined to the same area
every day, there is a sense that the boys are ‘‘miners in the making’’,
learning to become miners through constant proximity and observa-
tion. The petty traders, mainly girls, work over a larger geographical
area to sell the small goods that people need. Most of them work on
commission for a more established trader, or for their close relatives.
Fewer injuries and illnesses are reported among the support workers
and petty traders than among the miners. Table 2 illustrates that 40
per cent of the children involved in the diamond-related activities do
not earn regular money on their activity. These are mainly the chil-
dren working with support functions and the direct workers on an
irregular salary. However, the ones who report an income earn in
median one US dollar per day, equal to the street children in Accra
and Bamako. This is a quite an acceptable income compared to the
local level of salaries.

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In Voinjama, the children who have returned from life as refugees or
IDP’s are very much involved in daily household tasks, and for the chil-
dren ten to 18 years of age nearly all take part in the domestic work.
Nearly all the children are fetching water, sweeping, and washing dishes.
Both boys and girls, younger and older are doing this. Fetching fire-
wood is an activity that is done more by boys than girls, whereas the
girls cook and care for children more frequently than boys do. Launder-
ing and cleaning are more frequently carried out by the older girls, and
the girls start their work at a younger age than boys. In total the chil-
dren use about 3.5 hours a day on domestic tasks; however, the girls
spend significantly more time, both the younger and the older ones, than
the boys. While the girls’ burden of domestic tasks increases with age,
the domestic workload of the boys is quite stable.

In addition to the domestic tasks, 63 per cent are involved in other eco-
nomic activities. Farming is the most important activity, with 42 per
cent of the children currently involved. Less than 40 per cent of the girls
and younger boys are farming – while as many as 68 per cent of the
older boys are occupied with this. The older girls (37%) are more
involved in petty trading.

While the children in three of the case studies were selected because of
their economic activities, the Voinjama children were selected regardless
of their activities. However as Table 2 shows, 46 per cent of them were
receiving an income, with the median income of US$ 1.50 per day

The children were chosen for participation in the various studies because
of their involvement in economic activities. It was not expected to find
many who were enrolled in school at the time of the survey. For the
children in Voinjama, who have recently returned to their current place
of residence, the researchers did not expect to find many children cur-
rently enrolled at the time of the survey. Table 3 confirms that very few
of the street children were currently enrolled. However, one-third of the
children were formerly enrolled in school. The level of currently enrolled
children is higher in Kono (40%) and Voinjama (63%) than among the
street children. However, as shown in Figure 2, the level of education in
all the four cases is lower among the respondents in the case studies
than the reported country average (see World Bank, 2004a, 2004b,
2004c, 2004d). School attendance is one thing; the effectiveness of the
education received is a different matter. One indication of the effective-
ness of the education received is the level of literacy. In Figure 2, both
those who have answered that they read easily and those saying that

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they read with difficulty have been classified as literate – however, in all
the cases, except the case of Kono, the literacy level is far below the
level in the country in question (see World Bank, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c,
2004d). Many of the children who are in school, or have been in school,
reported that they are not able to read at all. One question that needs
to be raised is therefore the effectiveness of the educational system that
exists for these children.

WHAT ARE THEIR EXPECTATIONS?

The children in Voinjama believe that their life is better now than it was
one year ago. The simple fact that the war has ended and they have

100

Sierra
Leone

GhanaMali Liberia Sierra
Leone

GhanaMali Liberia

P
e

n
t

P
e
rc
e
n
t

Enrolment

Country
Cases

0
25
50
75

100
Literacy

Country
Cases

FIGURE 2

ENROLMENT AND LITERACY IN THE FOUR CASE STUDIES COMPARED TO THE

COUNTRY LEVELS (DATA ON COUNTRY LEVEL FROM WORLD BANK 2004A, 2004B,

2004C, 2004D)

TABLE 3

EDUCATION AND LITERACY

IN PERCENT BY CASE

Bamako Accra Kono Voinjama

Enrolment Never attended
a

64 62 47 26
Former enrolled 32 37 13 11
Currently enrolled 4 1 40 63

Literacy Cannot read 89 87 71 71
Read with difficulty 8 9 20 26
Read easily 4 4 8 3

N= 133 1321 618 479

a
in Accra 8 percent have been ⁄ are in Koran schools.

a in Bamako 50 percent have been or are in Koran schools.

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been able to return to their homes clearly contributes to this perception
of improvement (see Figure 3 and Table 4). The opposite is the case for
the street children in Accra and in Bamako. Only one out of four thinks
that their current life is better than the life they lived when they were at
home. The children in Kono, on the other hand, tend to occupy a posi-
tion in between the two extremes of the returnee children and the street
children: half of them think that life is the same now as one year ago,
but only twelve percent think it is worse. The post-war time has been

0
25
50
P
e

rc
e

n
t
75
100
Voinjama

Life now compared to at home/one year ago

…better ..same …worse
Bamako Accra Kono

P
e
rc
e
n
t
0
25
50
75
100

Expectation for the future

Get a better job Go hom e
Go to school Other

VoinjamaBamako Accra Kono

FIGURE 3

LIFE NOW COMPARED TO ONE YEAR AGO, AND EXPECTATION FOR THE FUTURE

IN PERCENT BY CASE

TABLE 4

LIFE NOW COMPARED TO ONE YEAR AGO, AND EXPECTATION FOR THE FUTURE
IN PERCENT BY CASE
Bamako Accra Kono Voinjama

Life now compared to …better 27 27 33 99
home ⁄ one year ago …same 14 9 55 1

…worse 59 64 12 1
Expectation for the future Get a better job 65 46 17 8

Go home 10 23 4 1
Go to school 11 18 43 84
Continue current
activities

4 6 2 1

Get married 0 4 5 3
Go abroad 4 0 16 2
Other 5 3 12 2

N= 217 1321 618 479

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much longer in Sierra Leone than in Liberia, so although nearly every-
body is happy that the war is over, most people realize that peace does
not necessarily equal prosperity but rather continued poverty.

Children in all the four cases were asked about their expectations for the
future, and almost none of them wanted to continue their current activity.
Quite surprisingly, more street children wanted to continue with their cur-
rent activities (4% in Bamako and 6% in Accra) than the children
involved in diamond-mining related activities and the returnee children in
Voinjama (respectively 2% in Kono and 1% in Voinjama). The street chil-
dren’s dreams are both to get a better job, and also to return home. In
Accra, one out of four dreams of returning home, whereas the street chil-
dren in Bamako only reported such dreams in 10 per cent of the cases. The
newly returned children in Voinjama, the ones who to a large extent
already go to school – hope to continue their education. School participa-
tion is the major dream among the children in Kono. However, the chil-
dren in Kono have more diversified dreams as well; quite a substantial
group wants to return home (17%) and an equally large group (16%)
wants to go abroad. Some say they want to study abroad whereas for oth-
ers this is more an idea about getting to the ‘‘promised land’’ of Europe or
North America, where they believe they immediately will become rich. It
is a dream about something else other than the present place, nothing
more, and nothing less. In one way or another, they dream about drawing
the ‘‘winning’’ number in the giant raffle of the Sierra Leonean alluvial
diamond-mining enterprise. Earning some extra money in the diamond
trade, whether as a miner, petty trader, or in one of the many support
functions, can constitute the little extra income that their families need to
send the children back to school, or, in the case of the older boys and girls,
enable them to pay their school fees themselves.

The most striking result shown is that very few children, in fact almost
none, would like to continue with their current activities. This indicates
that these children and youths see their current lives as very difficult.
However, we also need to keep in mind that the work conducted by
these different groups of children is quite temporary. The street children
will grow up to become something else, some of the girls will get mar-
ried, some will return home, some will find other kinds of employment
or embark on new survival strategies. Being a street child is not a life-
long career; it is by definition a temporary existence. It is an occupation
that some children are involved in before embarking on other attempts
at making a living. Much of the same is true for the children who mine
or are involved in economic activities related to mining. Mining is an

17Child labour in West Africa

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activity carried on for a limited number of months or years in order to
earn enough money to do something else: go to school, find a better job
(using money made in the mines to surmount barriers to entry), or
return to their home communities to start a new life. Even the returning
children in Voinjama are likely to grow up to become something else.
Most will become farmers, but some may also through education or
other means embark on different economic strategies than their fathers.
Being a child or being defined as a youth is after all still a relatively
short period of time in this part of the world.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Most of the children claim that they started with their current activity
because they were encouraged, but some of them were also forced by
their family or friends. This illustrates the poverty trap some people live
in. Parents do not send their children to work because they do not care
for them or because they are trying to exploit their labour capacity.
Child labour is a consequence of the combined forces of poverty, steep
school fees, and the fact that family income needs can be crucially sup-
plemented by what children can earn. Moreover, the finding that some
of the children are currently enrolled in school suggests that their
income contributes to their own education.

All the children in this article live under difficult circumstances, but
those working in the mines, or living a life as street children, are particu-
larly prone to respectively physical and mental stress. The type of labour
conducted in the alluvial diamond mines is extremely hard and repeti-
tive, exposing the young miners much more to chest pains and back
problems than those working with petty trade or in various support
functions. The life of a street child in West Africa is also hard. This is a
life that only the boldest and bravest will endure. The most fortunate
ones in our study are the returnee children in Voinjama. They have sur-
vived the Liberian civil war with their family or family-related networks
intact, and subsequently are able to return to their home of origin
together with their mother or father, or other close relatives. It is there-
fore only natural that these are the ones with the highest expectations
for the future and most satisfied with their current lives.

Education is an important goal in itself, and a crucial pillar in any strategy
to eliminate child labour. The results from the cases show that school
attendance among the children is low, not surprisingly, lowest among the

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street children and highest among the children in Voinjama in Liberia who
have recently returned after the war. In Voinjama, the children who have
been in refugee camps or IDP camps are the ones who have most fre-
quently attended school, simply because they have been living in a place
with easy access to the schools. School was the only occupation for the
children who lived in a refugee or IDP camp. This shows that the avail-
ability of schools is important, not only in forms of school buildings and
teachers, but more important in the perceived availability for each student.
Barriers for school attendance are often related to poverty. In some places
the formal school fees are an obstacle for the children to go to school, but
more commonly is the informal school fees, such as money to buy school
uniforms, food, books and so on that keep the children away from school.
In addition to the direct costs, it is hard for the poorest families to send
important manpower away from the homes.

There are actions that can be taken to improve the school attendance.
The most important in our view is to eliminate all the school fees, both
the formal ones, but more importantly also the informal ones. This will
erase barriers for many of the children for school participation.

Children are important manpower for the poorest families and this
should be taken into consideration in the planning of the school year.
The school holidays should be distributed to the most labour demanding
periods, such as the brushing and the harvest period, so that children
are able to follow the whole school year and still be able to help out the
family in the peak periods. In West Africa the period for vacations
should vary among a cocoa-bean growing area, a diamond area and a
rice growing community, depending on the period of the year with the
highest demand for manpower.

Poverty is the main obstacle for children to go to school. However,
another aspect that also must be taken into consideration is the quality
of the education. Even among the children who have gone to school for
several years, very few of them are able to read easily. This means that
parents pay money and children spend time on an education of a very
low quality. Efforts must be made to ensure the quality of the schools,
even on the lowest levels. All children who have been through four to
five years of basic education should be, at a minimum, able to read.

Almost none of the children in our various cases would like to continue
with their current activities. However, as much as they may dream about
another life, another career, the children in our surveys are realistic. They

19Child labour in West Africa

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know what kind of constraints they are up against. That is why a dia-
mond-miner continues to mine, the street child stays on the street, and the
returnee child continues to carry out his or her domestic tasks. Life can be
hard, but for the children in these ‘‘professions’’ it can not only be
endured, but also negotiated, as highlighted by other studies for vulnera-
ble and disadvantaged child and youth groups (Honwana and Boeck,
2005; Abbink and van Kessel, 2005; Utas, 2003). Also children in our
study are not just passive victims of structures and actions that they do
not comprehend, but also people who try to adapt to a situation where
education is much less an option than it used to be. Faced with these con-
straints the children, either as miners or as street children, try to assume
responsibility for their lives through the choice of the economic strategy
that they are currently using. Their situation is difficult, but still they make
use of their skills and small capacities in their attempt to negotiate their
daily lives. Our survey indicates that efforts to support these groups
should pay more attention to their lived realities of work and migration.

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23Child labour in West Africa

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LE TRAVAIL DES ENFANTS EN AFRIQUE DE L’OUEST:
MÉTIERS DIFFÉRENTS – VULNÉRABILITÉS DIFFÉRENTES

Se basant sur des données recueillies dans quatre études – portant sur
les enfants des rues à Accra, au Ghana, et à Bamako, au Mali, sur les
enfants et les jeunes qui travaillent à la production alluviale de diamants
dans la région de Kono, en Sierra Leone, et sur les enfants victimes de
la guerre dans la région de Voinjama, au Libéria –, le présent article
analyse les différentes stratégies économiques auxquelles recourent les
enfants et les jeunes pour construire leur vie. Dans tous les cas, le travail
des enfants est la conséquence de la pauvreté, du coût élevé des frais de
scolarité et de l’attente des familles concernant les gains du travail des
enfants. Les chiffres montrent que la présence des enfants à l’école est
faible, qu’elle est au plus bas chez les enfants des rues et au plus haut
chez les enfants de Voinjama qui sont récemment rentrés chez eux après
la guerre. Tous les enfants sur lesquels porte le présent article vivent
dans des conditions difficiles mais ceux qui travaillent dans des mines ou
vivent dans la rue sont spécialement victimes de stress mental pour les
premiers et de stress physique pour les seconds. Le type de travail qu’ex-
ige l’extraction alluviale de diamants est extrêmement difficile et répétitif.
La vie d’un enfant des rues en Afrique de l’Ouest est aussi très difficile.
C’est une vie dont seuls les plus forts et les plus courageux peuvent s’ac-
commoder. Les plus chanceux sont les enfants qui sont revenus de la
guerre. Ils ont survécu à la guerre civile au Libéria et leur famille ou leur
réseau familial sont intacts. Les enfants dont parle la présente étude ne
sont pas simplement des victimes passives de structures et d’actions
qu’ils ne comprennent pas, mais aussi des personnes qui essaient de
s’adapter à une situation dans laquelle l’éducation est moins accessible
qu’auparavant. Confrontés à ces contraintes, les enfants, qu’ils travail-
lent dans l’extraction minière ou qu’ils vivent dans la rue, s’efforcent,
par l’adoption d’une stratégie économique, de prendre les rênes de leur
propre existence. L’étude indique aussi que les efforts déployés pour
soutenir ces groupes devraient prêter une attention accrue au vécu des
personnes en termes de travail et de migrations.

24 Bøås and Hatløy

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MANO DE OBRA INFANTIL EN ÁFRICA OCCIDENTAL: A
TRABAJO DIFERENTE VULNERABILIDADES DIFERENTES

Sobre la base de los datos recabados en distintas encuestas (niños de la
calle en Accra, Ghana; niños de la calle en Bamako, Malı́; niños y
jóvenes que trabajan en las minas de diamantes de aluvión en el distrito
de Kono en Sierra Leone; y niños afectados por la guerra en el distrito
Voinjama, Liberia), en este artı́culo se analiza cómo los niños y jóvenes
intentan utilizar distintas estrategias económicas para dar forma a sus
vidas. En cada caso, la mano de obra infantil es una consecuencia de la
pobreza, de los elevados gastos de escolarización y de la necesidad que
tiene la familia de recibir los ingresos que los niños pueden aportar. Los
resultados demuestran una baja asistencia a las escuelas entre estos
niños, principalmente entre los niños de la calle, siendo ésta mayor entre
los niños que recientemente retornaron a Voinjama, tras la guerra.
Todos los niños de que se trata en este artı́culo viven en circunstancias
difı́ciles, pero aquéllos que trabajan en las minas o viven en las calles
tienden mayormente a sufrir de estrés fı́sico y mental. El trabajo realiz-
ado en las minas de diamantes de aluvión es sumamente difı́cil y repeti-
tivo. Los niños de la calle en África Occidental también trabajan
duramente. Este tipo de vida sólo lo aguantan los más fuertes y valien-
tes. Los más afortunados son los hijos de quienes retornan en Voinjama
puesto que han sobrevivido a la guerra civil en Liberia y mantenido
intactas sus familias o redes familiares conexas. Los niños encuestados
no son simples vı́ctimas pasivas de las estructuras y acciones que no
comprenden, sino también personas que tienen que adaptarse a la situa-
ción donde la educación no es una opción como solı́a serlo antes. Hab-
ida cuenta de estas restricciones, los niños, ya se trate de mineros o de
la calle, tratan de asumir la responsabilidad de sus vidas según la
estrategia económica que utilizan actualmente. Este estudio también
apunta a que los empeños para apoyar a estos grupos deberı́an conceder
mayor atención a sus realidades de vida, trabajo y migración.

25Child labour in West Africa

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1 Introduction
To consider the future relations between young
people, farming and food, various fields of study
need to be engaged. A youth studies perspective
helps us to understand the lives of young people
and their paradoxical turn away from farming in
this era of mass rural unemployment and
underemployment; it also provides a reminder of
the need and the right of young people to be
properly researched – not as objects, but as
subjects and where possible as participants in
research. Agrarian studies helps us to better
understand the possible future trajectories of the
agri-food sector and in particular the underlying
and continuing debate on large- vs. small-scale
agricultural futures; and bringing these two
perspectives together should help us to
understand the intergenerational tensions that
we see almost everywhere in rural communities,
particularly young people’s problems in getting
access to farmland and other agriculture-related
opportunities in societies where gerontocracy,
agrarian inequality and corporate penetration of
the agri-food sector, in varying degrees, are the
order of the day.

2 Rural youth, unemployment, migration and
the turn away from farming
One important strength of childhood and youth
studies, as they have evolved in recent decades, is
their insistence that we study young people in
their own right and from their own perspectives,
when they have previously been hidden in various
applied disciplines such as criminology, social
work, health and family studies. Understanding
young people’s lives requires looking both at how
youth is ‘constructed’ (imagined and represented
as a meaningful social, economic and political
category), and, also how it is actually experienced
by the young. The sometimes wide gap between
construction and experience is one key to the
understanding of young people. This
understanding, however, also requires us to
position young people within larger social
structures, and this relational dimension has been
relatively neglected in the new social studies of
childhood and youth. The concepts of generation,1

and of social reproduction2 help to make this link.

One problem with talking about youth in English
is that, unlike many or most other languages, we

Agriculture and the Generation
Problem: Rural Youth,
Employment and the Future
of Farming

Ben White

Abstract Youth unemployment and underemployment are serious problems in most countries, and often
more severe in rural than in urban areas. Small-scale agriculture is the developing world’s single biggest

source of employment, and with the necessary support it can offer a sustainable and productive alternative

to the expansion of large-scale, capital-intensive, labour-displacing corporate farming. This, however,

assumes a generation of young rural men and women who want to be small farmers, while mounting

evidence suggests that young people are uninterested in farming or in rural futures. The emerging field of

youth studies can help us understand young people’s turn away from farming, pointing to: the deskilling of

rural youth, and the downgrading of farming and rural life; the chronic neglect of small-scale agriculture and

rural infrastructure; and the problems that young rural people increasingly have, even if they want to become

farmers, in getting access to land while still young.

IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 6 November 2012 © 2012 The Author. IDS Bulletin © 2012 Institute of Development Studies
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

use the same word with two different meanings:
‘youth’ as people (like children and adults) and
‘youth’ as the state or condition of being young
(like ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’). Theories of
youth approach the study of young people in
many interesting and useful ways: youth as
action, youth as (sub)cultural practice, youth as
identity, youth as generation (Jones 2009). Policy
discourse on youth tends to view youth (in both
its meanings) in a future-oriented way: viewing
youth (the people) as ‘human capital’, and youth
(the condition) as typically a period of
‘transition’. The World Development Report 2007:
Development and the Next Generation (World Bank
2006), for example, sees youth in terms of a set of
interlinked transitions – from child to adult, from
education to employment, from ‘risky behaviours’
to responsible citizenship, from dependency in
families headed by adults to formation of their
own families, and so on. But young men and
women do not necessarily agree with either of
these ways of looking at youth. They certainly do
not (and should not) see themselves as ‘human
capital’, that is, as beings in which the adult
world invests, in order to derive some benefits
from them in the future. And future-oriented
‘transition to adulthood’ frameworks tend to
obscure the fact that young men and women are
also busy in the here and now, developing youth
cultures and identities in their own right, that is,
trying to be successful as youth and in the eyes of
their peers, besides (or sometimes instead of)
preparing themselves to be successful adults.3

‘Youth’ as the condition of being young (or of
being considered and treated as young in society)
tends to last longer than it used to. Rural youth
gets prolonged as young people remain enrolled
longer in education, their average age at first
marriage rises, and their entry into the labour
force is postponed. Some countries now define
‘youth’ in their national laws on youth as up to
age 35 or even 40. Each new generation of rural
young men and women now grows up, on the
whole, better educated than their parents. But
this has not been matched with expansion of
employment opportunities for the growing
numbers of relatively educated youth. During the
past two decades youth unemployment has
increased in most world regions. Rural
unemployment rates are higher than urban, and
youth unemployment rates are typically around
twice the adult rate (see, for example, the data
for various African countries in Dalla Valle

2012); close to half of all the world’s unemployed
are youth (World Bank 2006), and many others
are underemployed – having insufficient work
and/or insecure and poor quality informal sector
employment.

There has been some interesting research on the
lives and cultures of these globalised,
un(der)employed, relatively well-educated youth.
Much of this research has focused on young men,
and on urban youth, but many of them are of
rural origins, and are hanging on in the cities to
avoid returning to their villages, where they will
be expected to help with farm work and
experience subordination to the older generation.

One study in Mali describes the growing
phenomenon of thé-chômeurs (literally, the tea-
drinking unemployed), young men who gather
around portable charcoal stoves with teapots and
glasses, drinking sweet tea to pass the time. They
have had some formal schooling but now cannot
obtain the kind of (non-manual) work for which
their schooling claimed to have prepared them.
They have drifted to a precarious existence in
urban sites although there is no work for them,
because if they return to the countryside they
would be expected to engage in agricultural work
(Soares 2010). In urban Ethiopia where youth
unemployment rates are estimated at more than
50 per cent, Daniel Mains describes one of the
problems young male job seekers have to
confront – in contrast to their previous busy lives
in school or college – as simply ‘the problem of
passing excessive amounts of time’ (Mains 2007;
see also Mains 2011).

These young people are not necessarily idle.
They may take on various kinds of casual, short-
term jobs, or help parents in a family enterprise
where one exists, but report themselves as
‘unemployed’ because they are waiting, engaging
in odd jobs while looking for what they consider
appropriate jobs. We may thus need to introduce
a new category of the ‘working unemployed’.4

In Egypt and other societies of the Middle East
region researchers trying to capture this extended
transition period during which ‘young people wait
for pieces of their lives to fall together’, have
coined the term ‘waithood’ (Assaad and Ramadan
2008). In the Indian city of Meerut young college
graduates, the sons of lower middle-class Jat
farmers, enrol in one course of study after

White Agriculture and the Generation Problem: Rural Youth, Employment and the Future of Farming10

another, rather than going back to the village, and
describe their existence as ‘timepass’, a kind of
purposeless waiting (Jeffrey 2010).

This is not only a sad waste of potential in
human terms (or of human capital, for those who
insist on seeing young people in that way). It also
says something about the irrationality of the
economic and political structures in which we
live. There is something wrong with a world that
allows one-fifth of its young people to be
unemployed and countless millions more to be
underemployed. The International Labour
Organization (ILO) has had the issue of youth
unemployment on its agenda since 1935, and UN
Millennium Development Goal 8 has as one of its
targets to ‘develop and implement strategies for
decent and productive work for youth’. But
neither the ILO, nor other development agencies
or national governments, have any idea how to
generate ‘decent and productive work for youth’
on the huge scale which is needed.

The absence of workable ideas on youth
employment in the policy world is not surprising.
The problems generating mass youth
unemployment are structural ones, as every
takeover of smaller by larger enterprises, and
every investment in new technologies tends to
destroy jobs and expel people rather than
creating jobs and absorbing them (Bernstein
2004; Li 2009, 2010); this is happening in
agriculture and all other sectors, including those
where the white-collar jobs used to be located.
Structural problems require structural solutions,
but in a neoliberal world governments are not
inclined to spend money on these things. The
young are then forced to improvise their own
survival strategies, and this is reflected in current
policy shifts away from genuine ‘employment
generation’ to an increasing emphasis on
promotion of ‘entrepreneurial’ skills in World
Bank and ILO policy discourse and national youth
policies, thus a new kind of ‘do-it-yourself ’
employment strategy for the young. There is
little evidence that these policies increase
employment prospects or earnings. Young people
generally do not have sufficient technical
expertise to start a business and would do better
to acquire several years of paid work experience,
getting to know the ins and outs of their chosen
branch of activity before identifying a niche for a
new enterprise, and are anyway generally more
interested in a paid job in the formal sector.

Where are the needed jobs going to be created?
Agriculture is the developing world’s single
biggest employer and the agri-food sector will
certainly grow in the foreseeable future – it has
to grow, to fulfil the world’s growing demand for
food, feed, fuel and fibres (and other crops like
tobacco, various legal and illegal drugs, and
inputs for the perfume industry) – and if given
appropriate support it has the potential to
provide decent livelihoods for many more. But
agriculture in its present state appears to be so
unattractive to young people that they are
turning away from agricultural or rural futures.
As the Future Agricultures Consortium (2010)
concludes for Africa: ‘Young Africans are
increasingly reluctant to pursue agriculture-
based livelihoods’.

To understand better the reasons behind why
young people turn away from agriculture we
need to take account of a number of problems,
including:

the deskilling of rural youth, and the
downgrading of farming and rural life;
the chronic government neglect of small-scale
agriculture and rural infrastructure;
and the problems that young rural people
increasingly have, even if they want to become
farmers, in getting access to land while still
young.

3 Deskilling and the assault on rural culture
Various studies have noted how education as
currently practised (particularly secondary
education) contributes to a process of ‘deskilling’
of rural youth in which farming skills are
neglected and farming itself downgraded as an
occupation. Cindi Katz has described this
deskilling process in Sudan’s Blue Nile region,
based on fieldwork over a 15-year period: those
children who had gone to school found
themselves both ill-prepared for the kinds of
work available locally, and inadequately educated
for other kinds of employment (Katz 2004). In
wealthy countries we are just beginning to
understand what we have lost when manual work
becomes devalued and disappears as a component
of educational curricula (Crawford 2011).

On the subject of deskilling, it is interesting to
note how the idea of young people’s ‘right to
earn a livelihood’ has disappeared from
international rights discourse. Both The League of

IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 6 November 2012 11

Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924)
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948) explicitly stated that children have the
right to receive education or training which will
enable them to earn a livelihood. But this theme
disappeared in later human rights and child
rights conventions including the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), in
which preparation for earning a livelihood is not
mentioned as a goal of education (White 2005).

The alienation of young people from agricultural
knowledge and rural life skills is made worse by
the misguided political correctness of many anti-
‘child labour’ campaigners, who insist on the
right of children to complete their entire
childhoods without any experience of the world
of work. They would thus disagree with Marx,
who while recognising that child labour had
become an ‘abomination’ under capitalism, still
considered it a ‘progressive, sound and
legitimate tendency… in [any] rational state of
society’ for‘children and juvenile persons of both
sexes [to] co-operate in the great work of social
production’, for limited hours and while also
going to school – in his vision, from the age of
nine to 17 (see Marx 1866). There are many
cogent arguments for the importance of work
(alongside education) as a part of growing up,
and various studies have found that young people
who combine school and part-time work have
much better chances in labour markets after
leaving school.5

It is probably no exaggeration to say that in most
countries, formal schooling as currently practised
teaches young people not to want to be farmers
(see, for example, Biriwasha 2012).This is part of
a more general downgrading of rural life, an
‘assault on rural culture’ which goes far beyond
education and works through global consumerism
and media of all kinds. We should also remember
the absence of basic infrastructure in many rural
areas, due to decades of neglect in government
spending. Basic infrastructure for today’s young
people includes communications infrastructure.
We need to know a lot more about this; even if
farming could be made more attractive and
profitable and if land could be made available,
would rural life still be unattractive to today’s
globalised young men and women simply because
their smartphones don’t work there or because of
the absence of other facilities and environments
which they consider essential components of

successful youth? This is actually the easiest part
of the problem to take care of, and it will be
solved in the not-too-distant future.

Problems of neglected rural infrastructure can
be relatively easily overcome. So also, though less
easily, can problems of the irrelevance and anti-
rural bias of education, and the alienation of
young rural men and women from agricultural
work and agricultural knowledge, if
educationalists are willing to follow the proposals
of the International Fund for Agricultural
Development’s (IFAD) latest Rural Poverty Report:

A new and broader approach to, and a new
emphasis on, agricultural education and
training are required […] to provide the next
generation with the skills, understanding and
innovative capacity that they require (IFAD
2010).

But suppose that a new generation of rural
school leavers and college graduates do wish to
make their futures in ‘the great work of social
production’ in the agri-food sector, and suppose
rural schools encourage and support them in
this, what are their chances of acquiring a farm
when they are ready for it? Today’s rural young
men and women, even if interested in farming,
are confronted by the narrowing and sometimes
complete closure of access to land. This may be
due to corporate or absentee acquisition of
community land; the micro land grabs and
‘intimate exclusions’6 resulting from local
processes of everyday accumulation, land
concentration and social divisions that are
inherent in agro-commodity production; or
simply local gerontocratic structures which give
the older generation control of land resources,
and make them reluctant to transfer this control
to the next generation.

4 Youth and the global squeeze on farmland
Large-scale, government-supported corporate
acquisition of contested lands and common lands,
and the accompanying dispossession of local
farmers, pastoralists and forest users is occurring
on an unprecedented scale in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, and the former Soviet Union, but most
particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.7

This is not new in the history of the global South
or the global North. In the post-colonial decades,
however, many governments and agrarian social

White Agriculture and the Generation Problem: Rural Youth, Employment and the Future of Farming12

movements attempted to correct these historical
distortions by land reforms or other means of
breaking up large private or corporate holdings
and redistributing them to smallholders. But
‘once having nearly disappeared, … [corporate
farming] is now re-emerging everywhere under
the aegis of the agro-export model’ (van der
Ploeg 2008), as governments and international
agencies support the acquisition of great
expanses of land by large corporations, both
foreign and domestic.

While some local elders and local or national elites
may become rich by facilitating land dispossession
and exclusion, and some adult cultivators may be
seduced by immediate cash payments for
relinquishing their land, we also need to consider
what kind of future these land deals imply for
the next generation in rural areas. These deals
are usually accompanied by government and
corporate promises to develop modern, industrial
forms of agricultural production for export, and
to provide good jobs and incomes for local
people. But research has long ago shown that
these industrial (capital- and energy-intensive)
forms of agriculture are unsustainable. They also
do not provide employment on any significant
scale, tending to create enclaves of capital-
intensive, monocrop farming with minimal
linkages to the local economy.8

The World Bank’s own report on the global land
rush Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it Yield
Sustainable and Equitable Benefits? (2010) includes
18 commissioned case studies in countries which
were expected to provide at least some success
stories (including five African cases – the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia,
Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia). But these
studies only confirmed that corporate land
investments are not fulfilling their promise of
employment creation for local people, they are
environmentally destructive, they disadvantage
women, they ignore the proper legal procedures
for land acquisition and forcibly displace large
numbers of people. But the same report proposes
that all these problems of governance, illegality,
environmental destruction and so on can be
prevented by getting agri-business corporations
to sign up to a voluntary code of conduct, in the
form of seven ‘Principles for Responsible Agro-
Investment’, to ensure that they will behave
more responsibly in the future (World Bank
2010; see also Borras and Franco 2010).

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to
Food, Olivier De Schutter has become a lone
voice within the UN family arguing for a broader
vision: ‘not to regulate land grabbing as if this
were inevitable, but to put forward an alternative
programme for agricultural investment’, based
on reorientation of agricultural systems towards
modes of production that are both productive,
sustainable and contribute to the progressive
realisation of the human right to adequate food.
De Schutter therefore argues that:

Land investments implying an important shift
in land rights should represent the last and least
desirable option, acceptable only if no other
investment model can achieve a similar
contribution to local development (De
Schutter 2011, emphasis added).

A youth and generational perspective adds
another powerful reason to De Schutter’s
arguments. Large-scale land deals (whether for
purchase or long lease) should be seen as the
‘last and least desirable option’ because they
close off the smallholder option, not only for
today’s farmers but also for the next generation,
who are completely excluded from decisions
made at national or local level which may result
in their permanent alienation from land on
which they, or their children, might want to farm
at some future time.

What about the alternative models? We can
think of these in two ways. First, those that
involve different and hopefully better relations
with agri-business but that do not require, or
allow, agri-business corporations to own or lease
land on a large scale. Lorenzo Cotula and
colleagues have studied and compared several of
these alternative ‘collaborative business models’
which do not involve corporate investment in
land (Cotula and Leonard 2010; Vermeulen and
Cotula 2010). Looking at the relationship
between agri-business and smallholders in terms
of ‘ownership, voice, risk and rewards’, they
conclude that the impact on smallholders (good
or bad) depends not so much on the form of the
relationship but on how it functions in specific
contexts. One key ingredient is the willingness of
companies to employ the more inclusive business
models as a genuine component of their
operations rather than just as part of their
corporate social responsibility programmes;
another, very important in contract farming

IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 6 November 2012 13

relations, is the negotiating power of
smallholders (Vermeulen and Cotula 2010).

Small farmer organisations and movements tend
to go further than this. The Via Campesina, for
example, claims that smallholders can feed the
world, and keep the planet cool, without any
need for agri-business involvement, with slogans
like ‘Land-grabbing causes hunger! Let small-
scale farmers feed the world!’, and ‘Small-scale
sustainable farmers are cooling down the earth’,
and therefore demands: ‘1. The complete
dismantling of agribusiness companies, [and]
2. The replacement of industrialized agriculture
and animal production by small-scale sustainable
agriculture supported by genuine agrarian
reform programmes.’9

On the technical side, quite authoritative support
for smallholder futures comes from the
international study of the International
Assessment of Agricultural Science and
Technology for Development (Agriculture at a
Crossroads, IAASTD 2009). This report, which drew
on the expertise of about 400 specialists from all
over the world, concludes that industrial, large-
scale monoculture agriculture is unsustainable
and must be reconsidered in favour of agro-
ecosystems that combine mixed crop production
with conserving water supplies, preserving
biodiversity, and improving the livelihoods of the
poor in small-scale mixed farming.10

Small farmerism of course is not without its own
problems. Agrarian structures based on small-
scale (‘peasant’) farming are inherently unstable
under conditions of commodity economy, due to
the in-built mechanisms of land concentration
and agrarian differentiation, which many
authors from Lenin onwards have described
(Bernstein 2010). But these problems are not
impossible to overcome, once we get away from
fixations on private ownership titling to other
forms of secure individual tenure, subject to
maximum holdings and periodic redistribution.

5 The generational problem in agriculture
Reflecting on the possibility or impossibility of
smallholder futures means looking at the next
generation of rural people and specifically the
generation problem in agriculture. Traditional
agrarian societies are typically sites of patriarchy
in both gender and generational relations,
reflected in patterns of harsh discipline, and

cultural emphasis on respect for the older
generation, which are commonly seen in peasant
societies worldwide (Stearns 2006). Within these
patriarchal structures young people are not
passive victims, but exercise a constrained
agency. Studies of ‘traditional’ rural ways of
growing up in past times provide examples in
which children (both male and female) who
wished to farm were allocated a plot of land by
parents or other adult relatives, to farm
themselves, or engaged in paid work on the
farms of others, and controlled to a greater or
lesser extent the product of their farming work.

Sixty years ago, among the Tonga in Zimbabwe,
Elisabeth Colson found that many children had
their own fields. Unmarried boys or girls might be
given a portion of a field belonging to either their
father or mother before obtaining their own
fallowed land, and after harvest might have their
own bins in which to store grain from these plots
(Colson 1960). A generation later Pamela
Reynolds described how young children often
work, and are sometimes allowed to make their
own farms, on the land of a parent or other
relative, and ‘actively direct their labour
contributions in accord with various strategies
that maximise their chances of meeting current
needs, and establishing links among kin and
neighbours that will enhance future security’
(Reynolds 1991).

In how many countries is it still possible for
young people to slip themselves into autonomous
agricultural production and earning in this way?
One reason why young people express a
reluctance to farm may reflect their aversion, not
to farming as such, but to the long period of
waiting that they face before they have a chance
to engage in independent farming, even when
land is available. In many or most agrarian
societies the older generation – parents, or
community elders in places where land is
controlled not individually but by customary law
– retain control of land as long as possible. The
tension between the desires of the older
generation to retain control of family or
community resources, and the desire of young
people to receive their share of these resources,
form their own independent farms and
households, and attain the status of economic
and social adulthood, is such a common feature
of agrarian societies that it is surprising how
neglected it is in research.

White Agriculture and the Generation Problem: Rural Youth, Employment and the Future of Farming14

Is it surprising if young men and women today,
having experienced some years of education, are
reluctant to engage in long years of agrarian
‘timepass’: who wants to wait until they are 40 or
50 years old to be a farmer? Julian Quan,
reviewing changes in intra-family land relations
in sub-Saharan Africa notes:

limitations in young people’s access to land,
land concentration, and land sales and
allocations outside the kin group by older
generations can become highly problematic
where alternative livelihoods are not
available, and can trigger wide social conflicts
(Quan 2007).

Georges Kouamé provides an example of such
conflicts in Côte d’Ivoire, where Abure youth,
angered at the way the old men preferred to rent
the land out to Burkinabe migrants for pineapple
cultivation rather than letting their own young
people work it, destroyed the pineapple crops in
the field (Kouamé 2010). In Ghana, Kojo
Amanor has described how young people
engaged in night-time harvesting of oil palm
kernels, frustrated at the difficulty of obtaining
land now that so much of it had been given over
to the Ghana Oil Palm Development Company
(GOPDC) plantation: ‘The youth… argue that
the land belongs to them anyway and was taken
away unfairly so they have a right to harvest the
fruits’ (Amanor 1999).11

One important strategy in negotiating youth
transitions is young people’s mobility, which now
extends to all social classes and (in most
countries) both genders. These migrations are
not always permanent; we need to explore
further the phenomenon of cyclical, part-lifetime
migration. For young people ‘village’ (and also
‘farm’) can come to mean the place where you
grow up, which you will leave in search of urban
employment, but where you may later leave your
children in the care of their grandparents (and in
many cases, to care for your grandparents), and
where you may later return to be a farmer
yourself, and maybe a smarter farmer than your
parents, when land becomes available and urban
work has maybe provided some capital for
improvements.

Paul Richards and Krijn Peters have argued
consistently for the need to find ways to make
farming a better, a possible and a smarter option

for young people in West Africa. Peters (2011),
writing on Sierra Leone, describes in detail the
mismanagement and stagnation of the
agricultural sector, the false hope that education
gave young people, and their vulnerability to
local seniors, through the elders’ control over
customary courts, land, agricultural labour and
the allocation of marriage partners, in this
highly gerontocratic society.

The African rural setting is… inhabited…
increasingly by numbers of young people who
lack the basic modalities even to be peasants.
Marginalized by ‘customary’ institutional
exactions, first begun under colonial rule and
maintained by rural elites ever since, […]
They cannot even mobilize their own labour to
work the allegedly abundant land, since this
would be vulnerable to extraction from them
by marriage payments and court fines for
infringements of a traditional code of
behaviour regulated by elders (ibid.).

He therefore argues that ‘the dislike of rural
youth [for agriculture] is not focused on
agriculture as such, but on their vulnerability, in
village conditions, to exploitation by local elites
and gerontocrats’ (ibid.). Richards argues for
‘… the need to open up land to more intensive
use by making it more readily accessible to young
people, free from control by a local gerontocratic
order’ (Richards 2010). How many governments,
international agencies or NGOs have young
people’s access to land on their policy agendas, as
more than rhetoric?

Finally, turning to the often invisible group of
rural women and girls: as we know, much of the
world’s small-scale farming is done by women.
More than 30 years ago the UN’s CEDAW
Convention (UN 1979) – now ratified by all but a
few member states – established clearly that
women must ‘… have access to… equal
treatment in land and agrarian reform’ (article
14) and also that they must have equal rights in
intra-family property transfers through
inheritance (article 16). The Chicago Council on
Global Affairs recently released a special report
on girls in rural economies around the world,
noting that girls have the power to transform
rural economies, and should be seen as future
farmers and major stakeholders in agriculture
and natural resource management, which
requires among other things ‘ensuring equitable

IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 6 November 2012 15

inheritance and land rights for adolescent girls
and women by supporting efforts to change and
enforce relevant national and customary laws’
(Chicago Council 2011). How many of the
studies that found rural youth uninterested in
farming asked young women whether they would
be interested in being independent farmers, on
their own smallholding?

6 The future of rural youth in agriculture
Thinking about youth, farming and food raises
fundamental questions about the future, both of
rural young women and men, and of agriculture
itself. As I have tried to indicate, the current
debate about ‘land grabbing’ is in fact a debate
about the future shape of farming and the fate of
rural populations. If visions of a future based on
smallholder-based agriculture are to be realised,
and if young people are going to have a place in
that future, these problems have to be taken
seriously and given much more attention than
has been the case in recent policy debate, and in
recent research. IFAD’s latest Rural Poverty Report,
which gave special attention to young people,
underlines:

[the need] to turn rural areas from
backwaters into places where [young] people
have access to quality services and profitable
opportunities, and where innovation takes
place, whether in agricultural production and
marketing, in non-farm enterprises or in
energy generation (IFAD 2010).

The issue of intergenerational transfer of land
rights – or, when that does not happen,
intergenerational dispossession, when one
generation’s land is sold off which ought to have
been passed on to the next – deserves our
attention. If we are interested in small farm-
based alternatives to industrial capitalist
agriculture, there needs to be a generation of
rural men and women interested in taking up
the challenge.

This brings us back to the question of youth
agency, and policies towards youth. One
fundamental question affecting rural youth
futures is simply the question: ‘who will own the
countryside?’12 when today’s young men and
women reach adulthood. There is something
fundamentally worrying about policy contexts
which allow older men, in communities, local or
national governments to engage in or endorse
land transactions which may permanently bar
the next generation of young men and women
from farming careers, without giving those to be
affected any say-so in this process. The
establishment of special national Youth
Commissions, Ministries of Youth (or Youth and
Sports, Women and Youth, or Women Youth and
Sports) and Youth branches of Farmers’
Organisations do not always help in this regard;
they may even marginalise the discussion of
issues which affect youth by taking them out of
the mainstream. In such conditions young people
may have no option but to invent their own ways
of doing politics, as did the predominantly young
masses of people who went to the streets and
brought down the government of Madagascar in
protest against the massive land deal it had
made with the South Koreans.

There are real and important choices to be
made, with important consequences for the
coming generations. Will young men and women
still have the option, and the necessary support,
to engage in environmentally sound, small-scale,
mixed farming, providing food and other needs
for themselves, their own society and others in
distant places? Or will they face only the choice
to become poorly paid wage workers or contract
farmers, in an endless landscape of monocrop
food or fuel feedstock plantations, on land which
used to belong to their parents, or to move to an
uncertain existence in the informal sector of
already crowded cities? There are no easy
answers to these questions, and that is exactly
the reason why they deserve a place on research
agendas in the coming years.

White Agriculture and the Generation Problem: Rural Youth, Employment and the Future of Farming16

Notes
1 Generation: ‘the social (or macro-) structure

that is seen to distinguish and separate
children [and youth] from other social groups,
and to constitute them as a social category
through… particular relations of division,
difference and inequality between categories’

[i.e. between children/youth and adults]
(Alanen 2001; see also Mannheim 1952).

2 Social reproduction: ‘The material and discursive
practices which enable the reproduction of a
social formation (including the relations
between social groups) and its members over
time’ (Wells 2009).

3 To claim that young people are mainly
preoccupied with their transition to successful
adulthood is something like saying that young
mothers are mainly busy trying to become
successful grandmothers, or that retired
academics are trying to become successful
dead people.

4 This is more or less what Guy Standing means
by the young ‘precariat’ in his recent book
(2011).

5 These arguments are summarised in
Bourdillon et al. (2010).

6 The phrase is from Hall et al. (2011).
7 Among the standard sources on contemporary

‘land grabbing’ are various reports available
at www.grain.org; Von Braun and Meinzen-
Dick (2009); UN General Assembly (2010a);
World Bank (2010); Committee on Food
Security (2011); Oxfam (2011) and most
recently Anseeuw et al. (2012). The main

findings emerging from these studies are
discussed in Cotula (2012).

8 See, for example, Beckford (1972).
9 See various La Via Campesina position papers

on http://viacampesina.org.
10 IAASTD (2009). This report is not mentioned

in the World Bank Report on Rising Global
Interest in Farm Land, although the Bank was one
of IAASTD’s sponsors. See also the UN Special
Rapporteur’s report on agro-ecology as a
scientific framework to ‘facilitate the transition
towards a low-carbon, resource-preserving type
of agriculture that benefits the poorest
farmers’ (UN General Assembly 2010b).

11 See also Amanor (2010) for analysis of
changing intra-family and intra-generational
relations following on commodification in
south-eastern Ghana.

12 See White (2011), from which parts of this
article are drawn.

IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 6 November 2012 17

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White Agriculture and the Generation Problem: Rural Youth, Employment and the Future of Farming18

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IDS Bulletin Volume 43 Number 6 November 2012 19

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