Drought and floods are pushing families into poverty, and youth into modern slavery in northern Ghana.
As a child, James Kofi Annan remembers he understood injustice.
“It didn’t make sense to me that I should have to work from 3am to 8pm, typically,” the 42-year-old tells TRT World from Winneba, on the central Ghana coast.
James is the head of Challenging Heights, an organisation that rescues and reintegrates youth who have fallen victim to trafficking and debt bondage.
He was six years old when he was sold into slavery to work on a fishing vessel, where he remained until his escape six years later.
Lake Volta, the largest artificial lake in the world in southeastern Ghana has received some degree of attention in recent years as a hub for child labour and exploitation.
According to the NGO Free the Slaves, more than one third of 1,621 households it surveyed around Lake Volta are affected by child slavery.
Children and young people are taken to work in the fishing industry from very young ages, usually in exchange for money or loans provided to their parents. As families keep borrowing money in order to meet their needs, the debt continues to mount and the child – whom the trafficker would have paid an initial sum for – becomes trapped.
“The parents themselves, as a coping mechanism, decide to sell their children to [a] fisherman in order to get money. But anything they get is not enough to survive,” James explains. Young people end up “working endlessly without knowing how much [their] parents owe the trafficker and how long it is going to take to pay the debt.”
Read more:
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/former-child-slave-rescues-trafficked-youth-fleeing-climate-emergency-51466