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Despite the availability of child’s rights legislation for the fight against exploitative child labour, it still thrives in its various forms in Nigeria. The dignity of human labour seems to lessen when it comes to children in Nigeria. The research focuses on child labour practices in South East Nigeria, an area predominantly made up of Catholics. The research contends that child’s labour legislation is insufficient in preserving the dignity and rights of working children especially in the informal sector, away from the view of law enforcement agents. The goal of the research is to support the efforts of the Catholic Church in Nigeria with a synthesized theologico-legal resource for the protection of the rights of working children. The research observes that there is a near total absence of reference to working children in Catholic social teaching. Working children were not directly included in the historic encyclical of John Paul II (1981) on human work, Laborem Exercens. The research integrates the legislation on children’s rights with the social teaching of the Catholic Church in a bid to provide a Christian basis for supporting and developing laws protecting the rights of working children. The Catholic Church upholds the natural law/rights tradition. The natural law/rights tradition places the Catholic Church on familiar ground for the acceptance of “human rights” that are founded on the human being created in the image of God. As a panacea to exploitative child labour, it offers a theologico-legal resource for working children made up of twenty sample articles. It suggests “see-dialogue-judge-act-accompany” as a child-sensitive social justice principle. It encourages the formation of children’s workgroup/solidarity, foster family support groups and Catholic agencies for working children to ensure that the recommendations of the research are implemented and thereby promote a good practice of child labour in South East Nigeria.

Human capital is gained throughout a person’s life. Most of those human capital investments are made in childhood, because the returns to these investments take time to materialize. There are different activities, conditions, and policies that can either boost or reduce human capital investments. Schooling is a fundamental dimension of human capital formation, and the activities that children perform during their school years yield consequences throughout their adult lives. School-age children residing in poor households in developing countries spend their time not only attending school, studying, and doing homework, but also performing additional activities such as work. The time devoted to work activities might have effects on these children’s learning (negative or positive), and will affect their human capital accumulation. The first two essays of this dissertation (Chapters 2 and 3) study two aspects of children’s acquisition of human capital in Ethiopia. Chapter 2 begins by exploring the effects of child work on academic achievement in Ethiopia. The goal of this chapter is to measure the effects of different types of work on test scores for children aged 8, 12, and 15 years old. Child work should be treated as endogenous in the process of human capital formation, so in Chapter 2, I propose to instrument child work with a set of variables related to sibling composition and household and environmental shocks faced by the child’s household. This analysis is performed using three rounds of data from the Young Lives study for Ethiopia. The Young Lives data are publicly available and well documented. This study has followed two cohorts of children since 2002. Since 2006 (Round 2 of the study), time use data have been collected as part of the survey, including the time spent in a typical day performing different activities that can be classified as domestic work or market work. In addition, the Young Lives study includes very detailed data on child, household, and community characteristics. The results of Chapter 2 show that child work negatively affects vocabulary test scores and that it has no effect on mathematics test scores. Chapter 3 analyzes the urban-rural test score gap in Ethiopia. Currently, more than 80 percent of the population of Ethiopia resides in rural areas, and there is very little rural to urban migration. This chapter is the first study that decomposes this educational gap for Ethiopia. The decomposition of the test score gap follows the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition method. This method allows one to decompose the test score gap between an explained portion (differences in endowments) and an unexplained portion (differences in coefficients). The main contributors to the explained portion of the test score gap are identified (hours of child work, parental education and socioeconomic status of the household). The chapter also presents some policies that could be implemented to increase the human capital accumulation process of the vast majority of the Ethiopian population that lives in rural areas. The last chapter of this dissertation is quite different from the first two, although it continues to examine social sector policies in developing countries. More specifically, it explores the impact of gaining access to health insurance on different types on investments in Mexico. The program studied in Chapter 4 is Seguro Popular, a large subsidized health insurance program that currently covers more than 55 million persons. The study focuses on the impact of this program on human capital investment decisions. The chapter develops a model of consumption under uncertainty that is used to interpret the empirical results. It distinguishes between household expenditures that are liquid investments, which are useful for insurance purposes, and other, less liquid investments. The main hypothesis of the paper is that, upon obtaining access to public health insurance, households will adjust their investment decisions. This analysis was performed using data from Mexico’s ENIGH household survey from 2008 to 2012 and suggests that there is a statistically significant increase in the allocation of savings to illiquid, high return investments, relative to liquid, low return investments for households that gained access to Seguro Popular compared to uninsured Mexican households.

This ethnographic study explored the practice of domestic servitude and the type of relationships afforded to women and girls in this trade in an urban setting in Mali. The Mande belief system does not support the necessity of the domestic servant, yet many families now require the use of one or are in destitute situations and must place their own children into this type of work. While the traditional practices of child fostering and domestic servitude fulfill similar roles in Mali, the contradictions between the fostering system and the modern practice of domestic servitude have become intensified as the relationship between domestic servants and their employers attempt to adhere to traditional Mande beliefs. This study explored the relationship between the servant and her employer as they navigate evolving societal norms while still holding on to their Mande beliefs. This qualitative ethnographic study of 16 women in Mali, found that women who hire domestic servants and girls who are enrolled in school both benefit from this practice; yet, both were at risk of losing their personhood status as they shifted from their traditional female roles into independent selves. Domestic servants who were not enrolled in school had less to gain from this practice and were at an increased risk of losing their personhood. Domestic servants provided opportunities for the working woman to achieve autonomy, assisting the woman in maintaining her personhood status while simultaneously putting the domestic servant in danger of losing her status.