The General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) is set to replicate the ‘Torkor Model’ in other districts and communities in the Volta Region to minimize or hopefully eradicate every occurrence of child labour.
Business is always booming at communities along the Volta Lake; a situation that calls for all kinds of activities and labour. A research conducted late last year by GAWU uncovered untold activities of labour with the involvement of children being the most worrisome.
School children were seen at the banks of the lake engaged in active trading, fishing, and other forms of labour which were found to be unsafe and dangerous to children.
GAWU and its partners, after successfully purging communities within the Kpando Torkor zone from child labour; rescuing and providing education to these rescued children, have decided to replicate the Torkor Model in the North Dayi District of the Volta Region.
Particularly in Aveme, children in uniforms were seen selling, loading and offloading cargo from canoes and also fishing with adult perpetrators and engaging in other dangerous activities.
The Torkor Model, is a national document which was developed as a result of a long-term experiment of the best ways to address child labour. “GAWU went through a process of testing methodologies and creating models with sponsorship from the International Labour Organization, Mr. Tagoe disclosed. “In the initial stages of testing child labour, we did not tackle the root causes. We only withdrew children, enrolled them in schools, provided books and uniforms”.
Several methodologies later, GAWU decided they needed a more holistic plan of action and so piloted a few different approaches by involving parents, market women, fishermen, navy, youth, teachers and the children themselves.
“Two years after piloting the first model which concentrated on the children, we realized there were more children in child labour than we started with. This take-away gave birth to the Torkor Model, making it community based”. Explaining further, Mr. Tagoe said because child labour in Kpando model went beyond fishing, the Union began to organize and sensitize farmers and communities to take charge.
The spectacular success chalked by the improved model, and its effectiveness in eradicating child labour by involving all stakeholders, led to its adoption by the government of Ghana, as a national document and manual for eradicating all forms of child labour in the country.
story by: Lucy Baagyei-Danso
