Twelve-year-old Ahomansou Bernadette’s life has always been about balance. A fragile balance. Every afternoon, she places a basin on her head and nimbly wriggles through the dirt corridors of the Cotonou fishing market, in southern Benin, to sell cakes, bags of water and smoked fish.
His family situation is the definition of imbalance: after living with his father, he moved to his mother’s house to later spend a few months with his grandmother and finally go live with his uncle. The result of so much coming and going through poor homes was dropping out of school.
At the age of ten, Bernadette left school and was part of the 200 children who work every day in the Beninese market as fishermen’s helpers, warehouse workers or street vendors. But that goodbye to education that seemed definitive changed due to a stroke of luck with strange acronyms: PCA.
For two years, Bernadette has been part of thirty students in the Accelerated Course Program (PCA), an educational project managed by the Catalan NGO Educo together with other local entities, which has brought the school to the heart of the port.
The center, built in 2020 in the middle of the fishing market, offers concentrated courses to child workers in the port so that, in just three years, they can complete primary school, instead of the six required by formal education. In addition to recovering the years of lost education, the center adapts its schedules so that minors can work if they need to. For Lokonome Prosper, Educo center coordinator, that flexibility is key.
“We are aware that the only way for children in the market to go to school is to bring the school here. In addition, they go to the classroom in the morning so they can go to work in the afternoon. We must adapt to their reality because if not, none would come.”
Although she has to sell cakes and carry her basin every afternoon, for Bernadette things have changed since the port’s classrooms opened. “I really like going to school, they don’t hit you here! They give you a uniform, notebooks and we sing or have parties. Sometimes they even give us rice or other things. It’s the best place in the world,” she says.
If she could, she would send the afternoon basin to hell. “Child labor is not okay. If it were up to me, I would never work again until I was older.”
His classmate Konate Bangaly Ali, also 12 years old, must combine school with the sale of plastic bags in the nearby Misebo market, which contribute about two euros a day, vital for the family economy.
After two years without sitting at a desk, Ali returned to the classroom thanks to the port school and now enthusiastically explains a marathon day: “I get up at five in the morning to help my mother boil roots to sell them as remedy in the market, I walk two hours to get to school at eight and, when I leave, at one, I sell bags until seven or eight in the afternoon.” Despite her fatigue, Ali assures that she is happy. “At home we need the money, but now I can study and I will be able to achieve my dream of becoming a truck driver, like my father. At night I am tired, but I prefer this to just working and working non-stop,” she explains.
Although the center of the fishing port hopes to soon be able to accommodate more minors, the bustle of boys and girls walking among the boxes full of fish, the boats on the sand and the tangled nets warns that the problem is not yet there. resolved.
Lokossus Deogracias, 14, earns a few coins in exchange for his back pain: he vigorously works the crank of a fountain and charges seven cents to fill each bucket with water. She is a girl for everything. She also helps unload boxes of fish or sells pieces of ice. Her shirt full of holes is the letter of introduction to a life without respites. She would like to go to school but her uncle, who she lives with, doesn’t want her to go to school because he needs the money. “My dream? Go to school to learn to write or read well. “I would like to be a police officer or a doctor, have a normal job and earn money to live in peace.”
His words coincide with the rushing out of the students, who shout happily. Deogracias looks at the boys and girls shyly and notices their uniforms. She wishes out loud again and sighs. “Having clothes like that… Ah! “I would like that.”
