Child Labour Migration and Trafficking in Rural Burkina Faso
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2007.00407.x |
| Author | Albertine De Lange |
| Date | 01 June 2007 |
| Published date | 01 June 2007 |
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 IOM
International Migration Vol. 45 (2) 2007
ISSN 0020-7985
* IREWOC (Foundation for International Research on Working Children), Amsterdam, the
Netherlands.
Emerging Research
Child Labour Migration
and Trafficking in Rural Burkina Faso
Albertine de Lange*
These labourers are frequently youths of 14 or 15 with no previous experience
of work or conditions in the south, who leave their homes without the knowledge
or consent of their parents. In some cases written agreements are made but in
most cases it is only verbal. Labourers go of their own free will but in many
cases they are deceived as to their destination and nature of the work. The
system is open to grave abuse and there is already evidence of an undesirable
type of recruiter in some of the larger towns. There is little doubt that the terms
of whatever contract are frequently not observed by the employers who take
advantage of the ingenuousness of the labourers (Van Hear, 1982: 502) – 1930s,
Ghana, extract from a colonial report on child labour on cocoa farms.
INTRODUCTION
The above account, as well as other sources (Castle and Diarra, 2003: 153;
Père, 1988) and oral history accounts (interviews Tapoa, Kompienga 2005),
demonstrate that child migration for labour employment in agriculture is not a
new phenomenon in West Africa. It appears that in different places and at dif-
ferent times in twentieth century West Africa, children have left home to work
in agriculture elsewhere. No statistical data are available on the (changing) num-
bers of affected children in the region. With respect to worldwide trends, how-
ever, there is a consensus in literature that numbers of children leaving their
148 de Lange
© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 IOM
home communities independently of their families have increased (Whitehead
and Hashim, 2005: 2).
Regardless of these questions about the scale of the phenomenon, it is clear that
practices similar to the one described above are only recently receiving consider-
able attention from policymakers and child rights activists. The issue of children
being recruited in one West African country or region to work in another in-
creasingly became a matter of international concern in the second half of the
1990s, when journalists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) reported
the exploitation and abuse of children from Mali and Burkina Faso in Côte d’Ivoire
as well as children from Benin and Togo in Nigeria and Gabon. Children were
found to be subject to labour market transactions by middlemen, and the con-
ditions they were seen working in resulted in this type of child labour being
referred to as child slavery and child trafficking. Trafficked children working in
the cocoa sectors in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana received considerable attention,
set off by a British television documentary in 2000 on this issue. Since this
period, child trafficking has been the subject of highly active advocacy lobbies
and several anti-trafficking programmes have been set up in West Africa.
However, the focus on trafficking, and the way it is applied in the field, have
also evoked criticism from academic researchers. It has been argued that some
child migrants are too easily treated as trafficking victims, which can result in
stopping forms of child migration that are harmless or even beneficial for the
child (Castle and Diarra, 2003; Whitehead and Hashim, 2004). Fears have been
expressed that too easily applying the term “child trafficking” to situations of
child labour and child labour migration carries the risk of losing focus on the
eradication of the worst cases of abuse, which the term child trafficking initially
referred to (e.g. Dottridge, 2004b; Huijsmans 2006).
WHAT IS CHILD TRAFFICKING?
Only a few years ago did it become common practice in research, policy and
law making to use the term child trafficking for situations in which children are
recruited, transported, and harboured for their labour, for example in agricul-
ture. Until roughly 2000, trafficking was usually considered to be behaviour
resulting in the sexual exploitation of children (Derks, 2000; Dottridge, 2004a).
In the late 1990s, child rights activists started using the term to refer to specific,
harmful forms of child labour migration whereby children were traded by middle-
men for their labour (e.g. the recruitment of Beninese and Togolese children to
work in Nigeria). This use of the term trafficking was confirmed with the adop-
tion of the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking
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