Child Labour and School Attendance in Ghana

ABSTRACT
This study examines the effect of child labour on school attendance in Ghana. It particularly tests the significance of children’s work and their schooling outcome. The 2006 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey dataset on children aged 12-14 years with descriptive analysis, cross tabulation and binary logistic regression models were employed for the analysis.  The results show that children labour whether economic or domestic has a substantial effect on children’s school attendance after other socio-economic and demographic factors have been controlled for. By comparison, children’s economic child labour showed a stronger effect on school attendance likelihood than domestic child labour. The demographic and socio-economic variables of respondents were tested to see their effect on school attendance of children. Although the test for all these variables did not show any significance at the multivariate level yet they displayed a clear pattern prevailing in the literature. Factors that influence the relationship between child labour and school attendance include age and sex of the child as well as some characteristics of the household and its location.