Today I finally managed to collect some data for my dissertation. I had planned to come to Kasoa and work with an NGO to gather the data I needed, but since arriving, and spending a lot of time in the Omega schools I decided to narrow my focus slightly, from a general study of child labour, to looking at children who combine work with schooling. Therefore I decided to interview working children at some of the Omega schools, and I also plan to do some interviews in government schools. I will also be focusing more on the effect of combining the two on a child's education, and plan to give teachers and school staff questionnaires about this, In the Omega schools, despite their being private, the students are generally quite poor, and many of them work after they finish school.
Today I was finally able to do my first interviews, and managed to speak to 17 children, many of whom worked after school at the Kasoa branch of Omega schools. I conducted the interviews in the school's ICT lab, and Mercy, the school manager kindly provided me with the children, until break time when a number just came in to talk to me anyways! The initial findings indicate that most of the children sell, and a lot of them do this with their parents, but some do it alone. The main reasons for doing the job are to get money for their parents or to help their parents. I am looking forward to looking at how these findings differ from those in other Omega schools and in the government schools- it may even be interesting to compare the different locations, as I imagine that there are differences between the backgrounds of the children, based upon the area in which the school is located.
The big achievement of the day was actually getting some data, and the plan is now to get some more from the different schools and see how it goes!
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