Distress migration is a humanitarian problem of regional scale but when accompanied with child trafficking and migrant child labour, the effect is of a global magnitude. The project “Evidence based reverse invalidation of migrant/trafficked Child labour in Ghana” is designed to ameliorate the situation based on micro evidence from the Ejisu Juaben Municipality in the Ashanti Region and the Lambusie Karni District in the Upper West Region.

Both areas undoubtedly, played out as demand and supply areas for child trafficking and child labour in Ghana. In recent times, the unregulated casual labour market centres in the central business and commercial districts of cities in southern Ghana are filled with minors holding hoes and machetes waiting for prospective employers to engage them on a daily basis.

The concept “reverse invalidation” came about as a follow up on a case study conducted by Pledge Ghana on migrant and trafficked child labourers in the Ejisu Juaben Municipality. It became eminent from the study that child labour is a two pronged problem with demand and supply ends playing out as push and pull. While there has been various projects to address the child labour problem in the past, all these projects including several other development projects have consistently been concentrated in the agrarian cocoa, quarrying and fishing sectors (demand based). It has been so without any integrated linkages to other areas that have consistently been implicated as ‘supply’or ‘source’ areas geographically.

While past projects have either been multi-sectoral time bound and or area based, rehabilitating affected child labourers never really looked at implementation’ in the original source communities, reintegrating and probably raising awareness in the supply areas much less to mainstream and empower institutions there as espoused by the National Plan of Action (NPA) to eliminate child labour.