Child labour in Yaoundé-Cameroon: Some lessons drawn from a survey on children

• Published in: Zbornik radova Ekonomskog fakulteta u Rijeci Vol. 23; no. 2; pp. 195 - 216
• Main Authors: Simon A. Song Ntamack, Roger Tsafack Nanfosso
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; German
• Published: Faculty of Economics University of Rijeka 01.01.2005
• Subjects: Child labour; Human capital; Logit regression; Poverty
• ISSN: 1331-8004

Although child labour is a phenomenon widely studied around the world, there are few papers that tackle the problem in Cameroon. The objective of this paper is to fill the gap by questioning the subject in Yaoundé, the capital city. But child labour phenomenon is analysed here from a questionnaire that has two distinctive features: (i) the questionnaire is exclusively devoted to child labour, and (ii) all the participants in the survey are exclusively children themselves. No adult (parent, guardian, elder, employer, etc.) was consulted and given a chance to answer on behalf of a child. This process is extremely rare in child labour, since in general individuals other than children are requested to testify and answer inslead of children. While some results obtained from a standard Logit model on the determinant of child labour are well known, the others are either not known or insignificant. We suspect that the reason is the data collection.