Abstract
Child labor in developing countries continues to be a topic of policy and academic concern, particularly in Africa where there are more working children than in any other region. Scholarly attention has been drawn in part to gender, place of residence, and socioeconomic status as factors that shape the type of work that children perform and whether it impacts educational attainment. I explore these issues in the context of Nigeria through analysis of data from the 2004 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey EdData Survey. A series of logistic regression models of child labor confirm the existence of gender and, especially, socioeconomic disparities in children’s work. The data also indicate that girls and rural children face a double risk of working if they belong to poor households. A policy implication is that poverty alleviation programs—such as Mexico’s Oportunidades program (the erstwhile PROGRESA)—may help to reduce those forms of child labor that interfere with schooling. That this program has been found to more beneficial for girls suggests it may be particularly appropriate for Nigeria where gender disparities persist.
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Notes
Due to page limitation, a short version of the summary statistics is represented in Table 1. An extended version of the summary statistics table can be provided upon request.
The reader should be aware that this finding may be due to the manner through which the work variable is defined. The majority of children regardless of their schooling status are categorized as working when they perform any or a combination of the following types of work, 1) caring for sick relatives or household members, 2) doing domestic work such as caring for younger children, cooking, or cleaning, fetching water or wood etc., 3) tend animals, or work on the family farm or in the family business, and 4) work for an employer. Only a few cases of children engage in “work for an employer”, which is often identify as market/paid work. This is the reason why a multinomial analysis of work with categories of domestic, paid, and no work was not conducted. The result that girls are more likely to be working than boys may reflect the fact that the majority of the work that the children in the data are engaged in is categorized as domestic in nature. The research literature has documented that in developing countries, girls perform the large proportion of domestic work. The type of work that boys are found to perform is categorized mostly as market/paid work. I did not examine a multinomial analysis of work with categories of domestic, paid, and no work because of the low number of occurrences of children who do paid work. For this reason, I define work as children participating in either domestic or paid work.
A cross tabulation of household wealth and urban–rural residence indicates that the majority of households classified as richer and richest in the data reside in urban areas of Nigeria. Precisely, 63% and 82% of households categorized as richer and richest, respectively reside in urban areas. Alternatively, 91% and 82% of households classified as poorest and poorer, respectively are located in rural Nigeria.
The reader should note that the analysis in Model 4 was also estimated without the religion dummies. In the analysis, the logit coefficients and marginal effects on the regional dummies for north central, south south, and south west show significant effects on work engagement. I also ran the analysis in Model 4 without the regional dummies while retaining the religion dummies. The logit coefficients and marginal effects on Christianity and traditional/other religion do not show a significant effect of the odds engaging in work. Regardless of whether the region dummies are included or excluded from the analysis in Model 4 the religion dummies remain insignificant.
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Kazeem, A. Children’s Work in Nigeria: Exploring the Implications of Gender, Urban–Rural Residence, and Household Socioeconomic Status. Rev Black Polit Econ 39, 187–201 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-011-9126-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-011-9126-y