Meet Nigeria’s child apprentices

On Nigeria’s Children’s Day, we profile children who are working to support themselves and their families.

At the end of a school day, at weekends and during holidays, many teenagers in Ibadan, Nigeria start work in shops and on work sites. With unemployment at 33 percent in Nigeria, according to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, children are increasingly taking up practical apprenticeships – “isé-owó” which loosely means “work of the hand” – on top of their schoolwork to improve their chances of finding a job after they leave school. These apprenticeships are usually unpaid, but offer children the chance to earn a little money doing practical work as they learn, if they pick up the skills quickly enough. In some parts of Nigeria, as many as 49 percent of schoolchildren undertake them. The Nigerian Child Rights Act prohibits children from being engaged in “exploitative labour” but does not rule out children working altogether. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), as many as 15 million (43 percent) Nigerian children engage in work at some stage of their childhood in order to earn money for their families. Isé-owó refers to a genre of jobs that are largely learned by “watching and doing”. These include skills such as tailoring, fashion design and bricklaying.