compliment household earnings, either as a wage worker or through self-employment.<sup>8</sup> In contrast, children in Ghana typically assist with non-economic household chores before and after school, on weekends and during holidays such as fetching water and/or wood, cooking, washing clothes, buying household items, looking after siblings and other similar chores, with children interviewed in 2010 indicating that they contribute on average about 1-1.5 hours per day to such non-economic household tasks. A definition of child labor is adopted here in line with the ILO definition that is used by GLSS and therefore endorsed by the Government of Ghana: a child is employed if he or she did “any work for pay, profit, family gain or produce anything for barter or home use during the last 7 days” (GLSS 2008).<sup>9</sup> Child labor and assistance with household chores are thus two separate issues, for which respondents are asked separate questions in the GLSS survey. That is, while 87.5% of all children aged 7-14 assisted with non-economic household chores in the last 7 days (averaging 12.7 hours of _assistance_ per child), this paper only focuses on child labor for economic gain in which 15.6% of children are active in the last 7 days (averaging 26.3 hours of _work_ per child), with the average child laborer also contributing 13.5 hours to household chores in the last 7 days.

# **3. Descriptive results**

The aim in this section is to first demonstrate that child labor research should not just focus on monetary income as many non-poor children are working, and then secondly to lay out other potential sources of child labor that demand greater attention. These include the country’s agricultural dependency, social norms and a lack of higher returns to basic schooling, followed by other factors such as the demand for schooling, the geographic distribution of child laborers, demographic factors such as children’s age and parental education, and seasonality of child labor (discussed in that order).

In Ghana, 15.6% of children aged 7-14, the age group analyzed throughout this paper, are working in 2005/06. In merging levels of household consumption expenditure with children’s labor participation rates, Figure 1 shows that while 21.7% of children falling into the bottom two wealth quintiles are working, labor participation rates remain high for children in the middle quintile (12.4%), fourth quintile (8.4%) and richest quintile (4.6%). In terms of the geographic concentration of working children, 29% of children in the top three quintiles in the North (which incorporates the Upper West, Upper East and Northern regions) are engaged in labor activities compared to 34.1% of their counterparts in the bottom two quintiles in this part of the country. Illustrating the distribution of child laborers in relation to their total household expenditure, Figure 1 also indicates that only in the three regions of the North do over 50% of child laborers fall below the national poverty line, while in all seven

> 8 Employing children under 15 is also prohibited under Ghana’s labor decree from 1967, while legislation allows for undefined ‘light’ work. According to Article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child from 1989, to which Ghana is a signatory, “state parties recognise the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education” (OHCHR 1989). Although the enactment of legislation is an important step to mitigate child labor, field research in Ghana illustrates that law enforcement officials generally do not _de facto_ enforce laws restricting child labor, while institutional capacity to identify and penalise child labor is constrained, especially in rural, agricultural areas.

> 9 The prevalence of child labor varies by how labor is defined and how a child is defined, while this paper adopts this definition of child labor and a definition of a child as being 7-14 years old, with GLSS collecting employment data for those aged 7 and above.

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