Togo children 'sent away to work'

By Elizabeth Blunt
BBC News

Compulsory education might prevent children from leaving home

As many as one in eight Togolese children are sent away from home to work, a study of child labour in the West African state suggests.

They travel across borders, to as far away as Liberia, Cameroon or Gabon.

Sending very young children away to work is considered normal, interviews conducted by a charity in the worst affected areas showed.

Nonetheless, their parents concede that many come home ill, unhappy, and no richer than when they went away.

For an impoverished farming family it can sound very tempting - an offer from someone they know to take their son or daughter, and place them in a "good" family where they will earn their keep, and get some training or education.

These areas have always supplied migrant workers to richer parts of Togo and to neighbouring countries.

Children from poor families have always gone to stay with richer relatives, and helped around the house in exchange for board and lodging.

But what these families do not usually know is that the trade in housemaids and young farmhands is now big business.

Thousands of Togolese children and young teenagers are supplied to the labour markets in the capital, Lome, and to nearby Benin, Nigeria and Gabon.

Exploitation and rape

The development charity, Plan International, talked to families in the small towns and villages where the children come from; almost two thirds of families had had at least one son or daughter go away to work.

These were usually very poor families, generally with several children and often with parents who could neither read or write.

Girls - the majority of these working children - usually went by arrangement between their parents and an intermediary; boys often went without their parents' knowledge to get money or a bicycle, or just for the adventure.

One surprise is that children still go, despite the fact that other youngsters have come home sick, unhappy and often still destitute, the boys telling stories of exploitation on agricultural plantations, many girls pregnant as the result of rape, some even infected with Aids.

Plan is calling for free and compulsory education to keep children, especially girls, in school, community action to make parents aware of the dangers, and a greater willingness by the Togolese authorities to prosecute the traffickers.