Child labour and youth enterprise: Post‐war urban infrastructure and the ‘bearing boys’ of Freetown (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate )

This article focuses on the ‘bearing boys’ of Freetown, Sierra Leone to investigate the tension between child labour as an evil and child agency as a good, between post‐war reconstruction by a ‘weak state’ and people's (children's in particular) everyday creativity in the face of state failure. Freetown was one of the last safe places in the country during the civil war in Sierra Leone, and throughout the nineties people flooded into the capital. It is estimated that the population swelled from a pre‐war figure of 500,000 to a post‐war figure of almost two million. As Freetown got more and more crowded, many elements of the urban infrastructure were strained. In particular, clean ‘pump water’ is increasingly hard to come by for many residents of the city. ‘Bearings’ are one way that young Sierra Leoneans are addressing this water crisis. These are wooden carts designed and built by Freetown youth specifically to ferry around the city five‐gallon containers, the yellow plastic ‘ bata ’ commonly used to carry water. The bearing boys offer a way to talk about what the ‘weak state’ means in practice. They are responding to the collapsed urban infrastructure by creating their own new forms of money‐making endeavour, regulating themselves, and carving out a space for youth entrepreneurial and expressive activity in response to new post‐war economic and social needs.