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Mr Joseph Amenowode, Chair of the Select Committee on Employment, Social Welfare and State Affairs, on Wednesday called on stakeholders to help support the fight to reducing child labour in the country.

He said this could be done by ensuring that children are given the opportunity to develop their potential to contribute positively to national development.

Mr Amenowode made the call at a press briefing in Accra following a new child labour data released by the Ghana Statistical Service as part of the Ghana Living Standards Survey.

He said the data revealed that the total number of child labourers had increased over the last decade by about half a million children, with the prevalence at one-in-five children in child labour in Ghana, having hardly changed since the 2003 survey.

He said the report estimates that 1.9 million out of the total population of 8.7 million children between five and 17 years are in child labour, representing approximately 22 per cent, while 2.1 million, representing 14 per cent of all children were involved in hazardous work.

He said according to the laws of Ghana not all work done by children is classified as child labour, and should be targeted for elimination.

The children’s Act allows children of a particular age range to do light work that does not affect their health, and personal development, or interfere with their schooling.

Mr Amenowode said child labour is clearly different from acceptable work which is the normal way of growing up in preparation for adulthood. It constitutes unacceptable work for children because the child is either too young for the work or it prevents him or her from benefiting fully from education.

The forms of child labour prevalent in Ghana include, stone cracking, agriculture, illegal mining, commercial sexual exploitation of children, child domestic servitude, carrying of heavy loads among others.

He noted that globally child labour has reduced from 246 million in 2000 to an estimated 168 million children in 2012, according to the latest ILO Global Child Labour Report.

He however noted that most of the decline took place in Asia, clearly showing that child labour can be reduced with the right intervention, whereas the decline in Sub-Saharan Africa has been slow.

Mr Amenowode said the involvement of children in these activities has serious implications for their education and health; they lose out on quality education because they miss several classroom contact hours.

“Child labour contributes to the perpetuation of poverty. It is a national and indeed global problem, not only because it contributes to the school dropout rate and performance , but also because, by keeping children out of school it breeds another cycle of people who most likely will be less well off or end up in poverty later,” he added.

He said government has since independence recognised the problem of child labour and has put in place a comprehensive legal framework to deal with it.

He noted that Ghana’s parliament is also engaged in national efforts to address child labour, adding that, apart from passing legislation, parliament is represented on the National Steering Committee on Child Labour.

Parliament also scrutinizes and approves government’s plans and budgets to address child labour and holds government to account for progress, he added.

Mr Amenowode said a platform of ECOWAS parliamentarians against child labour was also launched in November last year with the support of ILO to expand solidarity, provide mutual support and improve effectiveness through sharing experience and knowledge on innovative, replicable and sustainable solutions to eliminating child labour.

He said despite various national and sub-national policy frameworks, including legal instruments and developmental plans to deal with the scourge, child labour still continues to be pervasive in the country and all must come on board to support the fight to its logical conclusion.