Harmless

• We examined a number of dimensions of children’s work in African agriculture in papers published in 2020 and 2022.
• It is certainly the case that some children are harmed by the work they do, and others may be forced to work, exploited or trafficked.
• And critically, neither their interests, nor those of other rural children, are necessarily served by ongoing efforts to eradicate child labour from African agriculture.
• First, by disrupting the dominant child labour discourse that pushes all children’s work, whether it be harmful or harmless, into the category of harmful child labour.

Key insights: harm and the school-work dichotomy

• They note that harm remains a contested concept, despite being central to efforts to define and eradicate child labour, and having been theorised within various academic disciplines.
• And harm arising from children’s work is likely to remain difficult to identify, assess and understand.
• Nevertheless, progress could be made with an approach to harm which incorporates its subjective dimensions, including children’s lived experience of harm, and is focused on well-being.
• The reality is that harm is experienced at school, and while travelling between home and school, as bullying, gender violence and physical abuse.

Don’t cause further harm

• There are ongoing initiatives to eradicate child labour from a handful of global agricultural value chains, including the cocoa chain in West Africa.
• As long as such initiatives fail to appreciate that much of the children’s work is harmless, and indeed beneficial, they have the potential to cause significant negative consequences – in fact, to harm – rural children and their families.