THE THOUGHTS ROOM

Child labour as prescribed by the ILO is any work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity. In Ghana, the Children Act 1998 states that the minimum age for admission of children into employment is 15. However, children may be employed at age 13 to do light work while the minimum age for engagement of persons in hazardous work is eighteen. Although many Ghanaian children are involved in economic activities that are not detrimental to their development and education, several others are compelled to engage in work which adversely affects them. Not all work done by children can be classified as child labour since these activities done by these children are intended to assist their family or to earn pocket monies in an attempt to fend for themselves. In its extreme forms, child labour involves children being separated from their families, exposed to grave hazards and or left to fend for themselves in the streets of large cities, often a

If Ghana were a man or a woman who has only 70 years to live as is ordained by God, I believe she would be experiencing a midlife crisis by now since at 56, she is still striving to gain grounds as an independent nation. A midlife crisis is experienced between the ages 40 and 60, a time during which humans go through a midlife transition and realise that their lives may be more than halfway over. This transition might cause them to take stock in where they are in life and make some needed adjustments to the way they live their life and most seem to come through the process smoothly without making major life changes. For those who have gone through this transitional stage, they might experience a range of feelings such as unhappiness with life, feeling a need for adventure and change, questioning the choices they have made in life and the validity of decisions they made years before, confusion about who they are and where they are going, and inability to make decisions about where t