Sold by their parents, around 20,000 children work on Ghana's Lake Volta, enslaved by fishermen they call 'master.' Join the fight against modern-day slavery: MyFreedomDay
Sold by their parents, around 20,000 children work on the lake, enslaved by the fishermen they call “master.”awn breaks over the water. Adam leads a column of five other boys through the high, golden grass to the softly lapping edge of Lake Volta in Ghana’s central region. The group of boys will spend the better part of the day fishing under a hot equatorial sun.
Most of the children come to the lake from hundreds of miles away. They are sold by their desperately poor parents to human traffickers, sometimes for as little as $250, which in this area, is what it would cost to purchase a cow. “When he says you should dive, you have no option. The fearful part is that you might not come back,” Adam says. “That’s what I fear most. You can be stuck down there and never come up. That’s why I’m so scared and don’t want to work on the lake anymore.”
Lake Volta is considered the largest man-made lake by surface area in the world. Much of the land that was flooded was forest, and trees still stand just below the surface. Each week, hundreds of boats come to the Kete Krachi market, where dried fish are sold, often obtained through the work of slave children.PACODEP is a Ghana-based non-profit which rescues the children they meet on the lake, then provides them with shelter and a chance to go to school. Their shelter, called Village of Life, houses roughly 100 children at any given time, most of whom have been trafficked on the lake.
PACODEP runs a school for hundreds of local children, as well as nearly 100 former child slaves, freed by the organization. “I normally visit various homes and get these boys to come help,” says Samuel, through an interpreter. “What this typically requires is to sit down with the family, with a mother or father or relative, sit down with them and agree on terms before you take the child. If your son stays with me for three years, the family normally requests a cow.”
“We haven’t started implementation yet,” says Prince Latif Oyekunle, the Deputy Chief Executive of the Krachi West District. “But we have discussed it at the executive committee meeting and at some general assembly meetings and a go ahead has been given.”In the meantime, Achibra and an armed local police officer he’s brought with him, continue their work on the lake.
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