That admission captures one of the difficult questions surrounding relaxed apprenticeship in Nigeria and across West Africa, when does learning a exchange become child labour?
Apprenticeship has a lengthy past in Nigeria, including the Igbo apprenticeship platform, frequently understood as Igba-Boi. As night falls, Ibukun goes fund to the site. Its task in the country has increasingly focused not solely on removing children from harmful task but furthermore on addressing the economic pressures that push households towards relying on children’s labour.
Experts express merely taking a child away from a workplace does not necessarily take out the economic pressure that brought the child there.
If a family cannot afford school-associated costs, lacks firm proceeds or sees apprenticeship as the extra valuable course into employment, the child may in time outcome to effort.
In Ibukun’s case, Alexandre’s explanation points to that tension. The incomplete building is both his workplace and his temporary home.
Within an empty room on the ground floor, a piece of cardboard lies on the cement floor. The validation was jointly convened by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment and the ILO, using endorse from the ECOWAS Commission.
Speaking during the validation meeting, ILO Country Tutorial for Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone and Liaison Office for ECOWAS, Dr Vanessa Phala, said the policy needed to change into improvements in children’s lives.
“Child labour is a violation of foundational person rights and compromises children’s upcoming,” Phala said.
She stressed that implementation would necessitate sustained financing, successful monitoring and teamwork amid government institutions, workers’ and employers’ organisations, civil population, communities and the personal sector.
Nigeria can adopt policies and laws, but enforcement becomes harder when children task in dispersed unofficial businesses, construction sites, confidential homes, farms and markets where inspectors may not routinely achieve.
The relaxed nature of the economy moreover means that the persons responsible for a child’s welfare may not consistently be the same persons responsible for the workplace.
A child may arrive including a parent, relative or master. The law moreover prohibits employment that is injurious to health or dangerous.
The ILO’s present country profile notes that Nigeria’s legal framework does not distinctly establish one extensive minimum age for admission to activity, during the time that the Labour Act contains particular thresholds for varied categories of activity and apprenticeship. Economic necessity shapes it.”
Tosin’s account points to a wider pattern of economic migration amid Lagos and neighbouring countries. It has additionally attracted cross-border entice as an indigenous model of entrepreneurship and skills development.
But apprenticeship becomes extra involved when the learner is a child. He can effort in Lagos although keeping his family and other interests in Benin.
For children, still, the condition can be distinct. He carries materials, mixes cement and works on an operating construction site. What are you doing here?” our correspondent, who lives stop to the site, asked him. “I don’t go to school,” he replied in pidgin English.
When the operating day ends, he finds time to play including other kids who have returned from school. The model, which developed in south-eastern Nigeria, has been widely studied as a shape of unofficial education in which young individuals discover out trades and firm skills by functioning closely together with qualified masters. The Child Rights Act, enacted in 2003, prohibits practices including the apply of children for exploitative labour and activities that deprive them of the possibility to attend school. Lagos attracts workers using its substantial offer, busy construction market and concentration of businesses.
For persons from communities stop to Nigeria’s borders, travelling to Lagos for activity can be component of an founded pattern rather than a one-off journey. Once they enter an unofficial workplace, there may be little paperwork or monitoring to present where they came from, who brought them, or what activity they are doing.
This is where the movement of humans can intersect together with child labour. But when children are portion of that movement, the same routes that furnish adults alongside economic opportunities can additionally disclose them to unofficial activity and exploitation.
For Ibukun, nonetheless, the voyage to Lagos has led not to a classroom but to a construction site.
“Young man, why are you not in school? The shovel is practically as tall as he is.
Ibukun crossed into Lagos to understand tiling but found himself carrying cement, mixing mortar and sleeping on cardboard at an pending building—raising difficult questions around poverty, migration, relaxed apprenticeship and child labour.
On a sunny morning in May 2026, he leans forward, gripping the shovel using both hands as he struggles to break across the heavy mixture on the concrete floor. The hazard goes beyond achievable injuries. The novel site was another modest residential building, where workers moved from room to room preparing floors and laying tiles.
This is widespread in Lagos, a status of greater than 20 million individuals under Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu. That requires teamwork betwixt labour authorities, border officials, child protection agencies and communities in countries of origin and destination.
It moreover requires clearer statistics for families on what constitutes lawful apprenticeship, what effort children can do and where the protections of the law start and terminate.
Migration does not cause child labour, but children who go together with adults or are brought into conversational jobs can be harder to detect and protected.
A domestic challenge
Ibukun’s story is section of a much larger domestic picture. I advance once every two weeks from Lagos to my village, where I have a building project going on. Modest boys from Benin Republic come to Lagos to do these jobs. Masons, electricians, carpenters, painters and tilers repeatedly shift from one project to another.
At the Ilasamaja site, the line is difficult to ignore. Construction sites, workshops, domestic workplaces and other modest businesses can be just as essential to the fight against child labour.
Cross-border workers are not inherently a child protection concern. Its provisions divided betwixt varied forms and conditions of effort rather than establishing one straightforward age at which every create of employment becomes lawful.
Under Portion 59, children under 15 are restricted from industrial task except in specified informative or training circumstances, during the time that children under 16 encounter additional restrictions, including labor underground, machine labor and sure other activities. The standard starts the coming morning again. When a child is exposed to hazardous conditions, works for enduring periods, or lives at the workplace, what is described as apprenticeship can commence to resemble child labour.
The Multinational Labour Business defines child labour in terms of task that is harmful to children’s well-being and development, interferes using education, or involves children who are too young to carry out it. It can additionally produce gaps in child protection when children transfer together with adults into conversational effort arrangements that are difficult for authorities to watch.
The same area platform that allows adults to cross borders in look for of possibility can too create it easier for a child to transfer from one country into a workplace where his age, education, and welfare may not collect satisfactory scrutiny.
The construction economy
A few houses away from the initial building where the tilers had worked, another residential project was nearing completion.
The Founder of Afatech Mechanic, Jamiu Ibrahim, said he earliest noticed Ibukun at the site. “This one is too compact for this gentle of job,” the engineer told The PUNCH. “He should be in school.”
When the earliest project ended, the tilers moved to another building conclude, and Ibukun went together with his boss. Not every assignment performed by a child automatically amounts to child labour, making the circumstances in which the effort occurs essential.
Ibukun’s circumstances elevate precisely that inquiry. There is no mattress, mosquito net, or electricity. “I sleep here,” the kid told this reporter, pointing to a corner of the room.
He lies on the cardboard at night and wakes up to another day of labor. It too prohibits the use of children in hazardous effort and provides broader protections against trafficking, forced labour and other forms of exploitation.
The Labour Act too places restrictions on the employment of children and young persons. He is not just observing an authority tiler. It’s the same when I obtain. Ibukun works on an operating construction site, carries materials, and works alongside adults. A child who spends the day functioning and the night sleeping at a construction site is furthermore missing out on school, recreation, and the stability of a suitable home.
The borders
The movement is not bounded to the Seme border along the Lagos-Badagry road, which Ibukun and his boss used to commute to Lagos.
Olabisi Akande, a vulcaniser from the Republic of Benin who has lived in Lagos for extra than 15 years, told The PUNCH that travelling in the middle of Nigeria and Benin was relatively straightforward.
Akande said he commonly travelled by path of Idiroko in Ipokia Regional Government Area of Ogun Status, along Nigeria’s western border using Benin.
“I normally pass throughout Idiroko in Ipokia Area Government Area in Ogun Situation. Yet far too several children go on to toil in mines, factories or fields, a lot of times doing hazardous task to live by manner of,” Russell said.
For Lagos, the response moreover requires attention to the relaxed economy using which numerous migrant workers locate employment.
That means labour inspections cannot focus just on big companies and conventional workplaces. Approximately him are bare walls, and pending rooms, a ordinary sight across Lagos.
Ibukun is an apprentice operating under a tiler, Kilamuwaye Alexandre, who brought him from Ifangni in southeastern Benin to Lagos. Children belong in school, not in task,” Houngbo said.
He linked the fight against child labour to the economic conditions facing parents, arguing that families demand entry to decent activity so they can retain their children in school rather than rely on their labour.
That association is largely so appropriate to Nigeria given that removing a child from activity lacking strengthening the household’s ability to live throughout can leave the underlying difficulty untouched.
Solutions
The world recommendations are understood but difficult to carry out at scale. Nigeria’s 2022 Statewide Child Labour Survey, conducted by the Domestic Bureau of Numbers in collaboration together with the ILO and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, estimated that 24.7 million children aged in the middle of five and 17 were engaged in child labour.
The survey found that 14.39 million were involved in hazardous effort. As citizens of ECOWAS person states, Beninese nationals can enter Nigeria lacking a visa for visits of up to 90 days through approved entry points under the area free-movement protocol. The boy wanted to detect out a address, he said, whereas his parents agreed to the arrangement. Whilst several children his age are getting established for school, 10-year-former Ibukun Oluwa is already at an pending building in Ilasamaja, a low-revenue neighbourhood in Lagos, pushing a shovel across a mixture of sand and cement. The protocol was designed to permit citizens of participant states to shift across the region free from visas for little visits, whilst implementation and longer-term residence rules have evolved.
That district mobility is essential for commerce and livelihoods. As the city grows, construction projects are extend across accepted neighbourhoods and novel communities. Services address domestic task and selling goods in markets, although field includes mining and manufacturing.
In Nigeria, the sectors differ from audience to readers. Photo: Elliot Ovadje
ECOWAS has recognised free movement as a key component of territorial integration because adopting its Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, Residence and Establishment in 1979. The building where he is learning a commerce is too where he sleeps.
Another tiler effective at one of the sites, Koku Tosin, is from Togo and has spent extra than a decade engaged in Lagos confirmed the development.
He said Ibukun was not an isolated case. “The boy is too compact but demanding-operating,” Tosin told our reporter.
“I have seen several cases like this. The ILO and UNICEF have called for stronger social protection, universal entry to class education, stronger child protection systems and decent effort for adults.
UNICEF Executive Administrator Catherine Russell said legal safeguards, social protection, investment in education and enhanced employment opportunities for adults were necessary to sustaining travel forward.
“The world has made big advance forward in reducing the quantity of children forced into labour.
JUSTICE OKAMGBA follows 10-year-former Ojo Ibukun and explores how poverty, migration, and relaxed apprenticeship can take children from neigbouring Republic of Benin to Lagos construction sites, where activity replaces school and protection becomes harder to enforce
In Nigeria, one of Africa’s biggest economies, childhood can launch using a workday. The ILO has identified poverty and restricted livelihood opportunities as large factors behind child labour in Nigeria. Children labor on farms and in markets, during the time that others are found in workshops, domestic employment, construction and other unofficial activities.
ILO Supervisor-Usual Gilbert Houngbo said the newest universal figures showed that progress was possible but warned that much extra needed to be done.
“The findings of our describe provide hope and present that travel forward is feasible. The nature of the task, his age, the conditions under which he performs it, the hours involved, and whether the arrangement interferes including his education all problem.
In his case, the construction site is not merely a training environment. There is a transparent difference betwixt acquiring a exchange and being removed from school to carry out physically demanding task. Across observation and helpful task, apprentices gradually obtain the skills and knowledge needed to earn a living and, in countless cases, sooner or later establish their own businesses.
The structure has been credited alongside helping construct businesses and generate employment, notably in commercial centres such as Onitsha. It is where he spends his engaged day. Their route of thinking is distinct. District mobility is an founded component of West Africa’s economic mechanism and remains necessary to exchange, employment and family livelihoods.
The check is to secure that the movement of persons does not produce children invisible, experts tell. Construction was between the hazardous industries identified in the survey, whilst hazardous task additionally includes activities involving extended hours, dangerous tools, unhealthy environments, and other conditions that can threaten children’s health and development.
The concern is additionally closely linked to household economic conditions. It lists 12 as the statutory minimum age for admission to apprenticeship under Publication 49 of the Labour Act, during the time that additionally noting proposed changes in the revised Labour Standards Bill.
Calling Ibukun an apprentice does not by itself resolve whether his effort is lawful. I don’t like utilizing the Badagry-Seme border axis,” said Akande, a married father of two.
For workers such as Akande, travelling amid the two countries has become element of everyday life. Once at the workplace, the child can become section of an relaxed chain of labour in which responsibility is difficult to trace.
Beyond Nigeria
Nigeria’s struggle is component of a wider concern concentrated in some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities.
The ILO and UNICEF’s 2024 international estimates, released in 2025, found that roughly 138 million children were engaged in child labour worldwide, including concerning 54 million in hazardous labor.
The figures showed upgrade from 2020, together with extra than 22 million fewer children in child labour, but the world still missed its sign of eliminating child labour by 2025.
Sub-Saharan Africa, where Nigeria belongs, carries the largest burden, as concerning 87 million children in the region are in child labour, accounting for virtually two-thirds of the universal entire.
Even though the prevalence rate fell to around 22 per cent, the complete of children affected remained broadly stagnant amid readers growth, conflict, poverty and stretched social protection systems.
The region’s economic realities build the challenge notably determined.
Agriculture remains the largest sector for child labour globally, accounting for 61 per cent of cases, followed by services at 27 per cent and field at 13 per cent. But a child’s selection for a commerce does not erase the responsibility to confirm that the activity does not deprive him of education or display him to harmful conditions.
The Nigerian law
Nigeria has multiple legal protections intended to deter children from being exploited at task. The two are from the same town, and Alexandre says most of their jobs are in Lagos.
When the task takes them across the border, they advance in the midst of Nigeria and Benin throughout identified routes. His story shows how poverty, migration, and unofficial apprenticeships can push children into activity in a city where construction sites are a ordinary sight.
From Benin Republic to Lagos
Alexandre said Ibukun had expressed a desire to become a tiler instead of persistent including school, and that his parents agreed to let him accompany him to Lagos.
“The lad prefers to become a tiler to going to school,” he told The PUNCH.
Alexandre described the organization as an apprenticeship that was influenced by the family’s circumstances rather than a inspect decision to retain the boy out of school.
“So instead of allowing the boy to stay home and become a nuisance, the parents agreed to activity including me to understand the tiling profession,” he said.
He acknowledged that Ibukun was too young to be effective on a construction site. It is too where he sleeps.
Government’s efforts
Nigeria has not ignored the problem, as it has developed nationwide policies and phase plans aimed at eliminating child labour, together with endorse from the ILO and other development partners.
The Statewide Steering Committee on the Elimination of Child Labour provides a platform for government institutions, workers’ and employers’ organisations, civil population and development partners to coordinate the statewide evaluation.
In 2021, Nigeria validated a Countrywide Policy on the Elimination of Child Labour and a Countrywide Activity Outline covering 2021–2025.
As that framework approached the terminate of its implementation period, the Federal Ministry of Labour and Employment, operating including the ILO and the Nationwide Steering Committee, began reviewing the policy and developing a recent five-year phase scheme.
The analysis process included a strategic development workshop held in Abuja from April 27 to 30, 2026, bringing together government, workers’ and employers’ organisations and other stakeholders.
The process culminated on June 2 and 3, when the Statewide Steering Committee formally validated Nigeria’s third Statewide Child Labour Policy and the Statewide Measure Scheme for 2026–2030.
The recent framework is intended to strengthen institutions, lessen hazardous child labour and generate conditions that permit children to stay in school and travel into decent labor when they extend to adulthood.
Source: From classroom to construction site: The child labour journey from Benin Republic to Lagos
