Lake Victoria, Tanzania
In Tanzania, as in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, child labor is a rampant problem, where children as young as four are forced into back-breaking, grueling work, often twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. In these cases, school, obviously, is never presented as an option. (“Ask a six-year-old if they like it, and they can’t even tell you,” Kido will say. “It’s what they know.”)

Aware that without extraordinary circumstances—parents who valued education above all else and a tiny scrap of paper—he could have been in the same place as these children and inspired by a Middlebury economics class, Kido applied for and subsequently received a research grant through the College’s Rohatyn Center for International Affairs. That grant took him to Lake Victoria, where he spent three months interviewing children—varying in age from four to sixteen, forced to grow up well before their time—about what they do, where they slept, what they ate.

Though skeptical at first, the children gradually opened up with Kido—because he spoke Swahili, because he was older and in Tanzanians are taught to respect their elders, and because he asked questions that they could understand (what do you do, not why do you do it).

He returned to Middlebury with binders full of data and a central critique of the study of child labor in places like Tanzania. Almost all the child labor surveys conducted today, Kido’s thesis claimed, are household surveys, where those queried are the heads of households. Child labor isn’t new, but the approach to studying the issue is severely flawed, Kido challenged. Rather than interviewing those who are forcing the children into labor—the very people who would be motivated to lie about the work being done—Kido made the case to talk to the people who are actually doing the work. Though the approach may seem intuitive, in Tanzania it breaks cultural barriers. And it illuminates a problem far more severe than originally thought.

On the strength of his thesis, Kido graduated with honors from Middlebury in the spring of 2005. Attending the commencement ceremony was his father, traveling to the United States—indeed, beyond the borders of Tanzania—for the first time.

This spring, Kido learned that the African Journal Review had accepted his thesis for publication.

Boston, Massachusetts
Yohanne “Kido” Kidolezi tucks into a bowl of clam chowder.

He’s eating dinner at the Top of the Hub, a bustling restaurant on the 52nd floor of the main tower in Boston’s Prudential Center. For the past few hours, he’s been telling a visitor his life story.

With floor-to-ceiling windows offering a 360-degree panorama of the metropolis, the restaurant affords the best views in the city. It’s twilight on a clear summer evening; sailboats dot the Charles, while off to the east, airplanes take off and land at Logan.

He smiles.

“My father couldn’t believe that this is where I worked,” he says of his offices over in the Prudential’s south tower.

Before his father returned to Tanzania in 2005, Kido brought him down to Boston to see the city where his son would be living. They walked through Quincy Market and Boston Common, scouted apartments for Kido, and toured the offices of the Analysis Group, a consulting group that provides economic analysis for law firms and corporations, where Kido would begin work that summer.

Kido is still with the Analysis Group, though he’s entertaining ideas of going to business school.

After that, he says, he’ll eventually return home.

“Anything I do would have such a larger impact there than here,” he explains.

He wants to reform the educationional system in Tanzania, and he says that he thinks often of the 300 children he interviewed that summer at Lake Victoria. “Going home and seeing those kids and knowing that this didn’t have to be their life…”

He looks out the window. In the distance, a plane takes off from Logan.

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