Citation

Ayodele RB, Olubayo-Fatiregun MA. Asian journal of humanities and social sciences 2014; 2(2): 19-30.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, College of Art and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

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Abstract

Apart from vehicular accidents, many other situations resulting in injuries during hawking do occur not only in Ghana, but in many other countries including Nigeria. Both Davis (2008) and Ranger (2010) attested to the fact that the main risk of hawking is accidental injuries. As cited by Okafor (2010), street hawking is a very common form of child labour in most cities in Nigeria including Lagos, Ibadan, Sokoto, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Jos and Benin, especially, where incomes are low and inadequate to cater for a whole family. This researcher has observed that hawkers' population is dominated by under-aged children who are neither conscious of their safety nor have the opportunity to decline their parents/guardians/masters' directives to hawk. The risk of accidental injuries among these children is increased by the fact that they usually hawk in company of their mates and are never guided by adults as it was with the traditional hawking system (Adeyemi, 2007). For these reasons Akpan and Oluwabamide (2010) revealed that accidents involving street hawkers especially children occur almost on a daily basis. The socio-economic, socio-medical and socio-legal implications of such accidents are enormous. The child, his family members, community, State and Nation stand to share the brunt of the child's involvement in accidents. The Government's enforcement strategy to eradicate street hawking especially by children has not yielded much effect. While the number of juvenile hawkers keeps increasing by day with daily injury occurrence ranging from bruises to life loss, related researches on child labour are concentrated on street children generally while issues specifically on hawking are treated as passing fancy in the available ones. The Nigerian policy makers are caught up with deciding whether street hawking should be totally eradicated or given a legal status. Those that advocated continuance of hawking have looked at it from the immediate economic stand point whereas, Okafor (2010) opined that when children work as wage earners to supplement the family income, it may solve some family economic problems but create new ones both for the children and the society at large. There is the need to identify these new problems as they relate to injury and socio-economic development of a nation such as Nigeria, hence, this study.

Language: en