It was 6:30 am, and while the harmattan breeze was blowing, a group of teenage girls, seated by the roadside around ‘Tashan Shongo,’ along Bauchi Road in the Jekadafari area of Gombe metropolis, were waiting for potential farm owners.
The teen farm labourers, mostly girls, shared one thing: they are all below 18 years old, holding hoes and sickles, waiting for potential farmers, who will hire them to work on their respective farms for cheaper wages.
Our correspondent reports that at the outset of the rainy seasons, several teenage girls, of school age, instead of being in school, gather along the major streets in major towns of the state and the capital city, Gombe, looking for farmers to hire them and take them to work on their farms.
They are paid between N2,000 and N3,000 as wages after working for over 11 hours in the farms of total strangers, who engage them because of the cheap labour they offer.
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The labour conducted in the farms by these girls at the onset of the rainy season includes clearing, ploughing, planting, weeding, and applying fertiliser and other menial work at the farms.
At the end of the farming season, the teenage girls work on the farm to harvest maize and cowpeas, a practice popularly known as ‘Barema.’
Among the children waiting for potential customers, was a 16-year-old girl, Maryam Sani, holding a small hoe.
She told our correspondent that she was withdrawn from school about two years ago, following her father’s failure to pay her school fees after she finished junior secondary school at one of the public schools in the state.
Read more: https://dailytrust.com/gombe-out-of-school-children-turn-labourers/
