Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter argues that the design and delivery of social assistance does not take adequate account of the nuanced role of work in children’s lives and that current interventions are therefore ill-equipped to tackle children’s harmful work. This argument is developed against a background of increasing evidence that social assistance has the potential to reduce children’s engagement with work but limited understanding of its impact on children’s engagement with harmful work. The chapter reviews a set of evaluations of social assistance schemes, and shows that few studies look beyond prevalence or intensity of work. This results in a substantial knowledge gap about the extent to which, and how, social assistance may reduce harm through work. An alternative way of understanding benefits and harms of children’s work is proposed.
This chapter focuses on the largely unexplored case of the Lake Volta fishery. Children’s work in the area has a long history, takes various forms and provokes significant controversy. Drawing on historical and descriptive evidence, the chapter questions the overly simplistic trafficking narratives around children’s economic activity in the fishery. It argues that this discourse obscures other dimensions of children’s work, including motivations and trade-offs, and the exposure of migrant and home-working children to hazards and harm. Lack of evidence means that sensationalist stories around trafficking drive perceptions of children’s relationship to the fishery. The chapter calls for more nuanced research into the nature of children’s work in and along the fishery value chain so that policies are appropriate and supportive of the wellbeing of children and their families.
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Millions of children throughout Africa undertake many forms of farm and domestic work. Some of this work is for wages, some is on their family’s own small plots and some is forced and/or harmful.
This book examines children’s involvement in such work. It argues that framing all children’s engagement in economic activity as ‘child labour’, with all the associated negative connotations, is problematic. This is particularly the case in Africa where many rural children must work to survive and where, the contributors argue, much of the work undertaken is not harmful.
The conceptual and case-based chapters reframe the debate about children’s work and harm in rural Africa with the aim of shifting research, public discourse and policy so that they better serve the interest of rural children and their families.
This chapter introduces the book by highlighting the tension between the celebration of family farming on the one hand and the desire to eliminate child labour from agricultural value chains on the other. It argues that at all levels of social policy, and in high-level public discourse, children’s engagement in economic activity is frequently conflated with ‘child labour’; and that this is particularly problematic for agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. To set the stage for the chapters that follow this introduction explores change and continuity in African family farming, and evolving perspectives on children, childhood and children’s work. Finally, the individual chapters are briefly introduced.
This chapter highlights the need to re-think how harm experienced by children in rural Africa is addressed. Drawing from the previous chapters it argues that approaching children’s harmful work as essentially an agriculture sector problem, a poverty problem, a school-quality problem or a cultural problem is of little value. The required re-think must address the existing framework of international conventions, instruments and organizational mandates; the framing of policy and public debate relating to children and work; the on-going re-shaping of agrarian relations and livelihoods in rural Africa; economic and political geography and specifically the left-behind rural areas and the poor quality of rural services including education; and shifts in state-society relations. And all of this must privilege children’s gendered experiences of the trade-offs around work, school and potential harm. An agenda for action is outlined.
This chapter explores policy and legislation aimed at preventing, regulating and abolishing harmful children’s work in Ghana. The government aligns itself with mainstream development partners and the UN in viewing harmful children’s work as a breach of dignity, wellbeing and fundamental human rights. Campaigns, laws and policies have been put in place to stop such work, yet the number of children involved in prohibited work and those combining such work with schooling continues to rise. The chapter identifies the incompatibility of these policies and programmes with the country’s historical, socio-cultural, economic and political realities. It concludes that legislation and interventions aimed at preventing children’s hazardous or harmful work should draw on both the formal legislative rights and the informal, traditional rights discourses if they are to help advance children’s development, rights and best interests.
This chapter explores the case of children’s work in shallot and other vegetable production activities. On the Keta Peninsula in South-East Ghana intensive, commercial, irrigated shallot production is centuries-old, and continues to rely on household labour. Children have long been an integral part of this system, but strikingly there have been no accusations of child labour or harmful work. The chapter explores the reasons for this and highlights the cultural acceptability of children working to support the household and local community. It might be better for policy makers and researchers to start with a framing of ‘benefit’ associated with children’ work rather than the simplistic assumption of ‘harm’.
This chapter starts with the fact that Ghana, the world’s second largest cocoa producer, has signed up to the US-led Harkin–Engel Protocol, signalling its commitment to ending the worst forms of child labour in cocoa production. It then highlights the tension between those who view all children’s work as ‘harmful’ and unacceptable (the ‘abolitionists’), and those who locate children’s work on a wider canvas, where cocoa production is embedded within local social institutions and family relations. The chapter provides a synthesis of recent academic and policy debates in relation to children’s work in cocoa production. In doing so, it provides a more dynamic assessment of children’s work in the West African cocoa sector, a prerequisite for more tangible, empirically grounded, pro-poor child protection policies and interventions.
This chapter argues that as children with disabilities make up a large minority of all children, there is no excuse for ignoring their engagement with work, and particularly harmful work. Faced with a dearth of data on the nature and extent of work that disabled children do, the chapter draws on what is available and in-depth knowledge of the subject to explain the complex relationships between work and disability, with harmful outcomes often being gendered and also exacerbated for children with disabilities. Children with disabilities face particular vulnerabilities and challenges with regard to work in agriculture. These are not addressed appropriately by current social policy initiatives that aim to improve the wellbeing of children.
This chapter situates children’s work within a grounded and holistic understanding of where work, learning and harm occur across the domains of children’s lives: household, work places and school. It introduces a relational, analytical framework – the edu-workscape – for analysis of education, work and harm across children’s lives, in context. The edu-workscape focuses on the social geographies of rural children’s lives as children move across different domains. Through an exploration of key tensions between schooling and work – tensions mediated, for example, by gender, age and ability – the chapter highlights issues that are highly pertinent to research methodologies for investigating children’s lives, and policy interventions aimed both at increasing educational participation and addressing children’s harmful work.
