regions of the South most child laborers live in households above the poverty line.<sup>10</sup> Among all child laborers in the country 49.5% live above the national poverty line—i.e. in households that are not characterized as subsistence-poor.

In terms of land, children are more likely to work in households owning land, especially for those in richer households. In the richest quintile, for example, 9% of all children are working in households owning land compared to 2% of children in landless households. Ownership of productive assets like land is an important source of wealth and collateral in agrarian economies and about half of all households in the country own land. On the other hand, land is an opportunity for children to be productively employed, with 70.5% of all child laborers living in a household owning land. While 33.1% of all child laborers in the country live in non-poor households that own land, only 13.9% of all child laborers live in poor households that own no land, illustrating that land ownership can be more closely correlated with child labor than household consumption expenditure (see also Bhalotra and Heady 2003).

**Figure 1: Labor participation rates for 7-14 year old children by quintile levels/total household expenditure, 2005/06**

<!-- Start of picture text --> National South North<br>0.27 0.36 0.34<br>0.29<br>0.28<br>0.15 0.21<br>0.12<br>0.08 0.11 0.10 0.09<br>0.05 0.06<br>0.03<br>1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5<br>Quintiles Quintiles<br>Households owning no land Households owning land<br>0.31<br>0.21<br>0.19<br>0.15<br>0.12<br>0.10 0.10<br>0.09<br>0.06<br>0.02 National poverty lin e<br>1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 Western Central Accra Volta Eastern Ashanti Brong A. Northern U. East U. West<br>Quintiles<br>Administrative region<br>0<br>.4<br>.3<br>.2<br>.1<br>0<br>.3<br>.2<br>.1<br>0<br>.3<br>.2<br>.1<br>0<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Source_ : Author’s illustration based on calculations of GLSS data. Note: The survey sample for the group of children covers 7,695 observations nationally, with 5,264 observations for the South and 2,367 observations for the North. Wealth quintiles are calculated throughout this paper based on annual household consumption expenditure (including food, housing and other non-food items) and adjusted for household size and composition, following the method used by the Government of Ghana (for details see Ghana Statistical Service 2007). In the bottom right figure, each dot represents an observation of a child in relation to their total household expenditure (in cedis) and their region of residence.

_The country’s agricultural dependency is one important factor among a broader range of factors that appears to create much demand for child labor._ 57% of Ghanaians are employed in agriculture, and the share is over 70% in the North. It is therefore not unexpected that nearly all child laborers in Ghana at 93.7% are employed in general agricultural work that is unpaid (GLSS 2005/06 data),<sup>11</sup> whereas over 70% of working children in developing

> 10 28.5% of the population lives below the national poverty line in 2005/06.

> 11 88.4% of child laborers work on the farm/land, 2.3% on a river/at the ocean (fishing) and 5.1% at home, while the remaining 4.2% work in other places.

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