The story behind the story:
child slavery on Lake Volta.

Lake Volta stretches across much of eastern Ghana—a vast, still expanse of water created when the Akosombo Dam was built in the 1960s. Its flooded forests left submerged trees that snag fishing nets, and its fishing economy runs, in part, on the small hands of children sent down to free them. Some are there with their families. Many are not. They have been trafficked—handed over, sold, or lured away from home with the promise of school or a wage that never comes.

How many children

Reliable counts are difficult on a lake this size, but the estimates are sobering. Ghana’s national Child Labour Survey found some 49,000 children working in fishing nationwide—20,000 of them in the Volta Region alone¹—and advocacy groups have long put the number of enslaved children on the lake itself above 20,000.² More recent fieldwork suggests the problem remains entrenched: a 2022 study commissioned by the International Justice Mission found that an estimated 38% of children in communities around the lake are suspected to have been trafficked, with a further 45% suspected to be in exploitative child labor.³ In IJM’s earlier operational assessment (2013 data), 57.6% of the children actually working on the southern lake’s waters had been trafficked into forced labor.⁴

The work, and the danger

Children on the lake paddle boats, bail water, haul and mend nets, and—most dangerously—dive beneath the surface to free nets snagged on the drowned forest below. The U.S. State Department reports that traffickers exploit children as young as four, that they force boys into hazardous deep diving, and that many drown as a result.⁵ Days can run from before dawn until dusk; advocacy accounts describe days of up to 17 hours with no pay, broken sleep, and too little food.⁶

Control is maintained through violence,
threats, and the withholding of food.

That is how the State Department describes the mechanics of this slavery: not chains, but fear, isolation, and dependence on the very person exploiting you.⁵ One study found that, in the regions around the lake, the great majority of children in this labor had suffered abuse.²

How a child ends up on the water

The root of it is poverty, not malice. In poor fishing and farming communities, a family unable to feed every child may accept a small sum, or simply a promise of schooling and care, in exchange for sending a son or daughter away to work. Research in the Volta region found that most trafficked children were obtained from a parent or another relative, often for a modest payment, and frequently without the family fully understanding the conditions the child would face.² The traffickers are sometimes strangers, sometimes acquaintances—occasionally relatives themselves.

Is it getting better?

Slowly, and unevenly. In its 2025 assessment, the U.S. State Department noted that observers report forced child labor on Lake Volta has decreased—though it cautioned that adult forced labor, including among migrant workers, appears to have risen in its place.⁵ Ghana’s Marine Police now run specialized patrols on the lake to identify and investigate trafficking cases,⁵ and the country has ratified the core international conventions against child labor—though enforcement remains the weak link.⁶

The clearest progress has come from rescue and reintegration. According to the Child Labor Coalition, the International Organization for Migration has liberated and reintegrated more than 700 children from the lake since 2002,⁶ and Ghanaian NGOs continue to recover children, return them to school, and work with the communities and fishermen who once enslaved them.

What is being done—and how to help

Two organizations stand out in this story. Challenging Heights, founded in 2003 by James Kofi Annan, rescues trafficked children, runs a recovery shelter and school, and works to prevent trafficking at its source.⁶ The International Justice Mission partners with Ghanaian authorities to investigate cases, support survivors, and strengthen the justice system around the lake.⁷

The film Fisher of Kids exists to keep this story in front of people who can change it. If it moves you, the most direct thing you can do is support the people already doing the work—above all, Challenging Heights.

What this means for travelers—for anyone who will one day be offered a child’s presence as part of an experience—is covered, carefully, in Ethical Tourism & Human Rights, a companion resource by the filmmaker—including how orphanage tourism separates children from families.

References

1. International Labour Organization / IPEC, Analytical Study on Child Labour in Volta Lake Fishing in Ghana (Geneva, 2013; reporting the Ghana Child Labour Survey’s figures for children in fishing; also summarized in refs 2 and 6). ilo.org/publications/analytical-study-child-labour-volta-lake-fishing-ghana
2. Ballard Brief, Brigham Young University, Child Labor Trafficking in the Volta Region of Ghana. ballardbrief.byu.edu
3. International Justice Mission, Child Labor and Trafficking in the Lake Volta Area (prevalence study; fieldwork 2022, published 2023). ijm.org/studies/child-labor-and-trafficking-in-the-lake-volta-area
4. International Justice Mission, Child Trafficking into Forced Labor on Lake Volta, Ghana (baseline study; 2013 data, published October 2016). ijm.org/studies/child-trafficking-into-forced-labor-on-lake-volta-ghana
5. U.S. Department of State, 2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Ghana. state.gov/reports/2025-trafficking-in-persons-report/ghana
6. Child Labor Coalition, Child Labor and Enslavement in Ghana’s Lake Volta Fishing Industry. stopchildlabor.org
7. International Justice Mission, Ghana program. ijm.org/ghana

Figures on a lake this size are necessarily estimates; sources and methods differ. Where studies disagree, we have favored the most recent and most clearly sourced.