"Freeing the child slaves of Lake Volta"

...For the past several years, I've traveled the globe, both as a philanthropist and a reporter for the Foundation's news program "The Domino Effect," bearing witness to, and trying to help solve, some of the world's most pressing problems. But perhaps nothing moved me more than a trip I made in November 2018 to Lake Volta, Ghana. It is on this massive artificial lake that I came across one of the most unnatural scenes imaginable in the 21st century. The lake, which was only created in 1965 with the construction of a hydro-electric dam, is home to an estimated 20,000 child slaves. Children as young as five are sold to human traffickers and made to work as fishermen for up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They are beaten. They are abused. They eat scraps off the table and sleep on the dirt.Some of these children drown when forced to dive under the water to untangle fishing nets. These forgotten children become yet another anonymous corpse resting at the bottom of the lake. When they die, no one is there to grieve for them and no one is punished for enslaving and endangering them. The only loss is a financial one. The fisherman who bought the child had paid the price of a cow to turn him into a slave. This is wrong and it must be stopped.