countries are engaged in agriculture (ILO 2002). It is important to note that the prevalence of child labor remained at 16% for the 7-14 year old population in both 1998/99 and 2005/06, while employment in agriculture for the total labor force also stagnated between 1999 and 2006 at 55 and 57%, respectively.<sup>12</sup> In contrast, annual GDP growth averaged 5% over the period 1998-2006 (which has been stronger in manufacturing and services than in agriculture) and the total poverty headcount at the national poverty line reduced from 39.5 to 28.5% over the same period (WDI data), neither of which have led to inevitable reductions in child labor.

_Child labor on the farm is often viewed as a basic component of socialization rather than a form of exploitation._ Social norms or attitudes towards child labor and the role they play are poorly understood in child labor research (see e.g. Edmonds 2008; Patrinos and Shafiq 2010).<sup>13</sup> The interview with the Minister of Education provides some insight into their role and he culturally relativizes child labor as part of life for many farming families, while he views, on the other hand, that children and youth should not be formally engaged as wage workers. The Minister states: “We are doing the orientation and sensitization for the parents also to understand the issues of economic activities for minors—child labor—so that they can desist from holding their children back because of economic advantages they have. [...] At the moment, I think we, in Ghana, are at home with the farming peoples. But what is happening is that some parents still want to engage their children as a way of training them for the future in the occupations in which they are, at the moment, engaged. I belong to the old school, where you ‘bring up the child the way he should go’ so that if you are a child in a farming family you should be able to learn about farming from your parents. But it is not the major issue now. [...] They are engaged because they belong to families undertaking farming. And they are just helping their parents. [...] We have family farms and you have to take your children to the farm to grow some cassava, to plant some maize in good season and harvest it to supplement the household food sources.” Social norms can thus help explain why shares of children assist on the farm even within households falling into the highest income groups. The Minister highlights that children’s contribution to family farming is not only a cultural norm but also has an established, positive cultural value and is even cultural heritage worth preserving.<sup>14</sup> In line with this rationale, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (2010) highlights the positive dimensions of child labor and states that “working on the farm or on the fishing boat or herding cattle can, if it doesn’t get in the way of school and occurs under safe circumstances, be very valuable. It’s a means of acquiring skills, giving children a sense of belonging and cultural identity” (see also Grootaert and Kanbur 1995; Canagarajah and Coulombe 1997; Patrinos and Shafiq 2010).<sup>15</sup> Field research suggests that for many Ghanaians, child labor is seen as part of growing up in that working, as opposed to just schooling, helps children get better accustomed to the skills needed later for employment, i.e. a kind of informal apprenticeship. Beyond core cognitive skills mediated in school such as literacy and numeracy, working with parents on the farm could be viewed as a complement to school as it can mediate not only technical skills needed for farming but also non-cognitive skills such as work habits (greater effort and discipline), behavioural traits (self-confidence) and physical characteristics (greater physical strength and endurance). This questions the common view that benevolent parents do not want their children to work – a strong assumption defended by Basu and Van (1998). It is however

> 12 Likewise, value added agriculture as a share of GDP did not reduce but rather remained stable at 40% in 1998 and 41% in 2005 (WDI data).

> 13 See also Berlan (2013) for a study that employs ethnographic methods to examine potential socio-cultural influences on child labor within the Ghanaian context.

> 14 It is possible that cultural norms may be – at least in part – endogenous to some economic characteristics in the longer run, especially the country’s agricultural dependency.

> 15 Humphries (2011) illustrates that during the British Industrial Revolution parents also often viewed work as more beneficial for their children than schooling in terms of the competences acquired.

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