ON THE eve of the UN international anti-slavery day today, a Ghanaian campaigner who was sold as a child to work on fishing crews has appealed for Irish support for a project aimed at saving children from slavery.
James Kofi Annan, a former banker who is due to attend a Front Line international conference in Ireland next month, was just six years old when he was sold to work in fishing.
He escaped seven years later, put himself through education, went to college and secured a job in Barclays Bank. However, he subsequently quit his job to found Challenging Heights, an organisation dedicated to rescuing children like him.
Mr Annan has received a number of international awards for his work, which has resulted in 78 children being rescued from work in fishing so far. Children are rehabilitated and placed in foster homes if their families are unable or unwilling to take them back, he told The Irish Times.
“The situation is very complex,” he admits, as in his case his mother was “overjoyed” when he escaped but his father was not. He had been forced to work up to 17 hours a day, with little food and shelter and constant abuse.
“Children are used by fishing interests, on Lake Volta and other areas, because of their size. They can be forced to dive down to free trapped nets, and sometimes they don’t survive,” he says.
“The parents might have sold the child, or might be persuaded to hand him or her over as a form of child-rearing or for repayment of a debt.”
He founded Challenging Heights in 2003 to empower children through education. The campaign has devised peer programmes, which work with adults and children, to stress the merits of education and the risks of financial offers from slave-traffickers.
The charity requires funds and volunteers. Mr Annan says the Government can assist by raising the issue with the Ghanaian government. He has also received death threats due to his work.
“The Ghanaian government has supported work to eradicate child labour in the cocoa industry, but the problem with the fishing industry here is that the trade is not international – and so consumer agencies are not so interested in highlighting it,” he says.
Mr Annan is among some 100 invited participants at the Front Line Platform for Human Rights Defenders in Dublin on September 14th-16th.
The International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition will be marked today by events worldwide. The date was selected by Unesco to mark the uprising of August 22nd and 23rd, 1791, on the island of Santo Domingo (today’s Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
