Presentation from international meeting on children's work/child labour in East Africa, hosted by the Africa Child Policy Forum, Organisation for Social Science Research in Eastern and Southern Africa, and Young Lives, 20-21 March 2014 in Addis Ababa

1. Dr Tatek Abebe
Associate Professor
Coordinator, Nordic Network of African Childhood and Youth Research
Norwegian Centre for Child Research
Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology
www.ntnu.edu
Presentation at East African Regional Symposium on Child Work/Child
Labour, 20-21 March 2014

2.  Perspectives on children’s work
 Exemplify the “infantilization” of social
reproduction
 Explore what the political economy perspective
might offer to contextualize children’s work

3.  Historicize children’s work in
wider social transformations that
shape community livelihood
trajectories
 Explore children’s views on
interconnected issues of care,
work and livelihood in
contrasting geographical settings
- Addis Ababa and Gedeo -
situating these within ongoing
debates on the social, cultural,
economic, political contexts of
child labour

4.  Participatory
approaches to explore
what children do,
where, with whom,
how and what they
think about it
 «My day»:
 «My work»:
 «Who matters»:
 «Work and school»:
 «Which work is best?»

5. Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 9 Regions
Southern Regional State; Gedeo Zone – high population density; cash economy (coffee,
chat) employ ca. 15 million people, and key to national revenue.

6. coffee chat fruits
enset

7.  Imperial regime
 Ethiopia’s integration into the world economy
 Socialist regime
 Farmers cooperatives
 Centralized market
 Current ALID strategy sees commercial agriculture as
 expanding the livelihood options for the rural population,
 risk management and diversification strategy for peasants
 a way of generating employment for young people.
 Rapid economic development can be achieved through
expansion of export-oriented crops
 Coffee and chat – Ethiopia’s ‘green gold’ – account for 70%
of total GDP. Most of these are produced in S Ethiopia.

8.  Global restructuring of coffee market
 Collapse of International Coffee Association 1989
 Sturctural Adjustment Programs
 Increased land tax, withdrawal of subsidies, rising costs of
fertilizers etc.
 Import tariffs on processed goods that prevent coffee
producers from adding value
 New entrants into the market, that destablised prices
 Plummeting coffee prices = 60% loss in revenue in
2003 in Ethiopia (Oxfam 2004)
 Point of no return, enset takes 4 to 5 years for the
trunk and root to be processed as food

9.  Disempowerment, coffee and chat took land away
from enset, “women's crop”
 Altered age- and gender-based divisions of labor
 Increased reproductive work burden, on girls
 Niche market facilitated exploitation of small scale
farmers by local money lenders, who also purchase
products prior to harvest, at unfavorable prices.
 Disruptions in education
 Despite expansion of primary schools, coffee producing
regions continue to have one of the highest levels of
truancy and school drop out rates in Eth
 Diminishing household resources for children

10. Harnessing the ‘agro-
forestry’ system
Trade and off-farm
activities

11. Apr-May
(planting)
June-Aug
(growing)
Sep-Dec
(harvesting)
Jan-Mar
(land
preparation)
 subsistence farming involving
food crops (e.g. maize, enset,
potato, root crops) and cash
crops (e.g. coffee, chat, sugar
cane, fruits), and selling farm
produce in market places
 selective picking mature
coffee beans from the tops of
trees, washing and drying etc
 off-farm, income generating
activities in the rural informal
economic sector, and nearby
towns

12. Young care-
giving activities
Examples
Domestic chores Cooking, cleaning, washing clothes and dishes, sweeping floor,
fetching water, collecting and splitting fuel wood, plastering huts and
repairing thatched roofs
Care work Caring for younger siblings, sick parents, relatives; preparing special
food; helping them to turn in bed and walk
Personal care involving bathing sick/weak family member; assisting
to eat, dress and use the toilet
Nursing of sick family members by administering drugs and applying
creams on bedsores; communicating with doctors and health workers
Income generation
activities
Sale of farm proceeds
Informal labour for cash (farmhands, domestic help, retailing
commodities in markets, portering, sewing services etc)
Paid work in coffee picking and processing
Portering, retail work, hawking etc
Begging
Emotional and
practical support
Emotional support and encouragement to those dying
(Abebe and Skovdal, 2010 p. 572, AIDS Care)

13.  The deepening and transference to children of the
burden of daily and generational reproduction
 Children involvement in marginal livelihoods –
transgress moral and socio-legal boundaries – to
buffer household poverty
 Expanded duration, intensity and field of children’s
work
 Repositioning of children’s daily roles, e.g. within
domestic spaces, in local markets and agricultural
work
 Periodic, regular, and substantial home-based care-
giving work of children

14.  How do the interplay between different and deeply unequal
forms of power and exchange within the realm of
economics disadvantages working children?
 In what ways political and economic processes shape (and
are reshaped by):
 - the lives that children live?
 - the “choices” children and their families confront?
 - the spaces of livelihood children must draw on, negotiate,
and navigate?
 How the «intimate and global intertwine»
 Re-introduce social reproduction as an important but
missing aspect of debates areound development