Thomas Yeboah

Thomas Yeboah currently serves as Research Fellow/Lecturer with the Bureau of Integrated Rural Development (BIRD), Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi Ghana. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge, UK and has nearly a decades’ experience working on issues around household relations, gender, and generational relations in studies of rural development and migration, especially children and youth’s labour migration and their engagement with both rural and urban economies. Thomas has strong research interest on young people’s imagined futures/aspirations and employment in rural Africa, labour migration, and migration policies. An important aspect of his work focuses on examining the socio-cultural underpinnings of children’s work, the relationship between child labour and the more benign forms, how these are shaped by gender and generational concerns and how children and youth understand these jobs and their involvement in them.

Thomas has strong qualitative and quantitative research expertise and has consulted for several development-oriented organisations (eg. International Cocoa Initiative, Global Shea Alliance, UNFPA/UNICEF). Recent relevant work that he has led or contributed to includes the Merrian Institute for Advanced Studies sponsored fellowship research on ECOWAS free movement protocol and diversity of experiences of different categories of migrants in Ghana. This work was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education. Other recent works include lead researcher on school children’s work on shallot and the entire horticultural system of production in Anloga, Volta Region where more than 400 school children were interviewed under the Agricultural Policy Research Programme in Africa (APRA); Ghana Country Researcher on young people’s engagement in the commercialised rural economy of Africa in three country contexts (Ghana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe) funded by DFID now FCDO; and Co-Investigator on the research programme ‘Action on Harmful Child Work in African Agriculture’ (ACHA) (2020-2027); Q-methodology study of young people and work funded by Irish Aid and the UK government, and synthesis of youth employment in the rural economy of Africa, including evaluation of governmental and donor interventions  to promote youth employment in the rural economy of Africa funded by the Dutch Knowledge Platform on Inclusive Development Policies (INCLUDE), Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the International Labour Organization (ILO), under the aegis of the Global Initiative on Decent Jobs for Youth.

Projects