Accra, March 23, GNA - The media was on Tuesday urged to be proactive in exposing issues and other factors that give rise to child labour and demand full redress from the appropriate quarters. "Be watchdogs of the people's rights and liberties against all forms of infringement or abuse of children rights," Mr Affail Monney, Vice President Ghana Journalists Association, said.

He said this at a day's workshop on child labour for the media on the theme: 93The Role of International Labour Organization (ILO) Constituents in the Fight Against the Worst Forms of Children Labour". The workshop was to raise the interest of journalists wishing to specialize in such issues and provide the media with a platform to access and evaluate information on child labour and articulate the concerns of the society on the issue.

It was also to strengthen collaboration between the media and civil society in the fight against policies and programmes they consider inimical to child rights and development.

Mr Ransford Tetteh, President of GJA, said issues of child labour were fast becoming topical in the country and it was increasingly evident that its causes and consequences cut across all spheres of development.

Child labour, he said, was no longer a social issue but rather an economic, legal and even a political one.

Mr Patrick Asare Nelson, a programme officer of ILO, who presented a paper on the current situation of child labour in Ghana, explained that child labour was work performed by children below 18 years and one that deprived the person of basic human rights.

These are work that was abusive, hazardous, exploitative and harmful to the health and development of the child. Using research conducted by the African Centre for Human Development, he said child labour was an organized crime involving recruiters, transporters, receivers/distributors and employers. He mentioned some of the activities of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) as small-scale mining (gallamsey), trokosi (ritual servitude), child domestic servitude, commercial sexual exploitation of children among others and called for immediate action to prohibit such work and protect children from being engaged in it. Mr Nelson said regions with WFCL were Upper East, Central, Western, Eastern, Greater Accra and Ashanti.

Out of the over six million children in Ghana over two million were engaged in economic activity with an estimated total of about 1.273 million (20 per cent) of children engaged in child labour.

The largest proportion of 57 per cent of working children are in agriculture, hunting and forestry, 20 per cent are in sales, 9.5 per cent in production and 11 per cent in other general work such as porters, truck pushers and drivers' mates, among others.

The research further revealed the WFCL were predominant in the rural areas. Boys dominated sectors were fishing, commercial agriculture, mining and drug peddling whilst girls were predominately in child domestic work, porters (kayaye), prostitution, selling and chop bar work.

He, however, noted that light work, which he described as some household chores which help children acquire basic knowledge, skills and those that give children sense of responsibility should not be misconstrued as child labour.

Children, he said, were the future of the country and called on all stakeholders to protect and help them to become useful and productive citizens by speaking against WFCL everywhere and anywhere.