Peer-reviewed article
Beyond School Enrollment: Education Quality, Fosterage, and Child Labour in Ghana’s Fishing and Mining Economies
Osei CK, Dogbe KA ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examines why child labour persists in Ghana's fishing and mining communities despite increased school enrollment. Using national household survey data, the researchers found that higher school fees (indicating better education quality) are associated with lower child labour, but this relationship is stronger in resource-dependent areas than nationally. Notably, children often attend school and work simultaneously rather than choosing one or the other, and cultural practices like fosterage complicate family decisions about children's time and labour.
Key points
- School enrollment alone is not uniformly associated with lower child labour participation in Ghana
- Higher school fees (proxy for perceived education quality) are consistently negatively correlated with child labour, with larger effects in fishing and mining communities
- A positive correlation exists between school hours and child labour, suggesting schooling and work coexist rather than substitute in resource-dependent settings
- Economic drivers including poverty, child wages, and self-employment in agriculture and resource sectors strongly predict higher labour incidence
- Fosterage shows heterogeneous, context-dependent associations with child labour with no uniform pattern across samples
Limitations
The study uses school fees as a proxy for education quality and acknowledges endogeneity risks from unobserved factors, meaning causal relationships cannot be established. The findings are presented as conditional associations rather than causal effects.
Abstract
Abstract Child labour persists in Ghana despite rising school enrollment, particularly in natural resource-dependent fishing and mining communities where economic incentives and cultural practices like fosterage complicate household decisions. This study examines the correlational relationships between perceived education quality (proxied by school fees), fosterage, and child labour, assessing whether these associations are more pronounced in high-prevalence resource-endowed sectors compared to the national average. Using household- and community-level data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS 7), we estimate probit regression models with average marginal effects for a full national sample and subsamples of fishing and mining communities (defined by dominant economic activity at the enumeration-area level). Controls include child and household characteristics, poverty status, parental presence, employment type, and school hours. Results are presented as conditional associations, acknowledging endogeneity risks from unobserved factors. The results show that school enrollment alone is not uniformly associated with lower child labour participation. Higher school fees (as a proxy for perceived education quality) are consistently negatively correlated with child labour incidence, with larger marginal effects in fishing and mining communities than nationally. Fosterage shows a heterogeneous, context-dependent association with child labour, lacking a uniform pattern across samples. Economic drivers (poverty, child wages, self-employment in agriculture/resource sectors) strongly predict higher labour incidence. Notably, we find a positive correlation between school hours and child labour suggesting that schooling and work frequently coexist rather than substitute for one another in resource-dependent settings. This study is among the first nationally representative, comparative analyses of education quality (via fees as a revealed-preference proxy) and fosterage in Ghana's high-risk fishing and mining sectors, revealing sectoral heterogeneity that national-level studies obscure and highlighting limits of enrollment-focused policies in resource-endowed contexts. The findings support targeted investments in school quality and nuanced social protection to address sector-specific labour dynamics and fosterage practices in high-risk resource-dependent areas to reduce child labour more effectively than school access-only approaches. JEL Codes: I25, J13, J20, J80, O10