Elsbeth Robson

Informal m-health: How are young people using mobile phones to bridge healthcare gaps in Sub-Saharan Africa?

The African communications revolution has generated optimism that mobile phones might help overcome infrastructural barriers to healthcare provision in resource-poor contexts. However, while formal m-health programmes remain limited in coverage and scope, young people are using mobile phones creatively and strategically in an attempt to secure effective healthcare. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data collected in 2012-2014 from over 4500 young people (aged 8-25xa0y) in Ghana, Malawi and South Africa, this paper documents these practices and the new therapeutic opportunities they create, alongside the constraints, contingencies and risks. We argue that young people are endeavouring to lay claim to a digitally-mediated form of therapeutic citizenship, but that a lack of appropriate resources, social networks and skills (digital capital), combined with ongoing shortcomings in healthcare delivery, can compromise their ability to do this effectively. The paper concludes by offering tentative suggestions for remedying this situation.

The 'Kitchen' as Women's Space in Rural Hausaland, Northern Nigeria

In Hausa villages of northern Nigeria the kitchen rarely exists as a separate room. Except in very wet or cold weather cooking takes place in the open courtyard of the multi-generational extended family compound, or gida. Cooking for family members is a female activity shared, or rotated, among co-wives in what are more often than not polygamous households. Thus, the kitchen is a site of female co-operation, jealousy and various other charged emotions. Using empirical data from a village case study this article analyses how kitchens can be viewed from a feminist perspective as sites of womens power.

Taking the long view : temporal considerations in the ethics of children's research activity and knowledge production.

Children are increasingly engaged in the research process as generators of knowledge, but little is known about the impacts on childrens lives, especially in the longer term. As part of a study on childrens mobility in Ghana, Malawi and South Africa, 70 child researchers received training to conduct peer research in their own communities. Evaluations at the time of the project suggested largely positive impacts on the child researchers: increased confidence, acquisition of useful skills and expanded social networks; however, in some cases, these were tempered with concerns about the effect on schoolwork. In the follow-up interviews 2 years later, several young Ghanaian researchers reported tangible benefits from the research activity for academic work and seeking employment, while negative impacts were largely forgotten. This study highlights the unforeseeable consequences of research participation on childrens lives as they unfold in unpredictable ways and underscores the temporal nature of childrens engagement in research.

Context matters : fostering, orphanhood and schooling in sub-Saharan Africa

A growing body of research suggests that orphanhood and fostering might be (independently) associated with educational disadvantage in sub-Saharan Africa. However, literature on the impacts of orphanhood and fostering on school enrolment, attendance and progress produces equivocal, and often conflicting, results. This paper reports on quantitative and qualitative data from sixteen field-sites in Ghana and Malawi, highlighting the importance of historical and social context in shaping schooling outcomes for fostered and orphaned children. In Malawi, which has been particularly badly affected by AIDS, orphans were less likely to be enrolled in and attending school than other children. By contrast, in Ghana, with its long tradition of kinship fostering, orphans were not significantly educationally disadvantaged; instead, non-orphaned, purposively fostered children had lower school enrolment and attendance than their peers. Understanding the context of orphanhood and fostering in relation to schooling is crucial in achieving Education for All.

Who bears the cost of ‘informal mhealth’? Health-workers’ mobile phone practices and associated political-moral economies of care in Ghana and Malawi

Africa’s recent communications ‘revolution’ has generated optimism that using mobile phones for health (mhealth) can help bridge healthcare gaps, particularly for rural, hard-to-reach populations. However, while scale-up of mhealth pilots remains limited, health-workers across the continent possess mobile phones. This article draws on interviews from Ghana and Malawi to ask whether/how health-workers are using their phones informally and with what consequences. Health-workers were found to use personal mobile phones for a wide range of purposes: obtaining help in emergencies; communicating with patients/colleagues; facilitating community-based care, patient monitoring and medication adherence; obtaining clinical advice/information and managing logistics. However, the costs were being borne by the health-workers themselves, particularly by those at the lower echelons, in rural communities, often on minimal stipends/salaries, who are required to ‘care’ even at substantial personal cost. Although there is significant potential for ‘informal mhealth’ to improve (rural) healthcare, there is a risk that the associated moral and political economies of care will reinforce existing socioeconomic and geographic inequalities.

Heavy loads: children's burdens of water carrying in Malawi

This paper documents water carrying by children aged 9-18 years across Malawi in Southern Africa and evaluates impacts on health and school attendance. At 12 urban and rural field sites quantitative data were collected by questionnaire interviews with 1,504 children. Qualitative data collection preceded the survey. Overall 89 per cent of girls and 66 per cent of boys carried water, with 68 per cent of girls, but just 32 per cent of boys, carrying water daily. Water as the heaviest load routinely carried was reported by 57 per cent of children and 35 per cent reported pains and health problems from load carrying. Up to 10 per cent of girls and 6 per cent of boys responded that carrying water made them late or absent from school. Geography, age, and other factors influence these patterns. We conclude that girls in rural and remote rural communities have the heaviest burdens of daily water carrying detrimental to their health and school attendance. Improving water access and challenging gender stereotyping s...

Children’s Bodies: Working and Caring in Sub-Saharan Africa

Most ordinary Majority world1 children in sub-Saharan Africa undertake heavy (paid and unpaid) burdens of work (Schildkrout 1981, Kayongo-Male and Walji 1984, Reynolds 1991, Robson 1996, 2004a, 2004b, Bourdillon 2000, Katz 2004). Children’s everyday work includes domestic chores, head-loading, working on farms, estates and in family businesses, trading, collecting water and firewood, herding livestock and caring for the sick, disabled or elderly and younger siblings. Their young working bodies perform necessary productive and reproductive work for the survival and well-being of themselves and their households. The responsibilities carried by the bodies of African youngsters contradict prevailing global discourses of childhood as a period of carefree socialisation in which young bodies are protected from physically demanding, and potentially harmful, manual work while engaging in schooling and play.

Beyond the School and Working Day: Building Connections Through Play, Leisure, Worship and Other Social Contact

This chapter explores the everyday mobility of pre-pubescent children and older teenagers outside of school and work arenas. Life beyond formal education and work is crucial not only to young people’s health, well-being and happiness of and in the moment, but will contribute to shaping their identity in the long term, not least through the construction of social networks (and associated creation of social capital). Rural and urban recreational activities are compared across diverse sites. Discussion then moves beyond physical mobility to the implications of increasing access to mobile phones as a new element that can leapfrog and thus mediate distance, with potentially significant impacts on social contact patterns. A final section reflects on mobility associated with participation in religious worship and related activities. Gender issues (and associated permissions and restrictions) form a persistent theme through the chapter.

Ethics committees, journal publication and research with children

Stepping down from co-editing Children’s Geographies and at about the same time taken up a new role as founding chair of the Research and Evaluation Ethics Committee for Save the Children UK stimulated reflections on some issues pertaining to research with children, ethics committees and academic journal publishing. In this editorial, I explore some of the debates between the merits of formal ethics regulation systems (as operationalised by institutions) and the practice of ethics-related reflection and action (by critical researchers). It is to be hoped that the reflections set out below will be pertinent to children’s geographers and other readers of this journal. Over the 14 years since its founding, the pages of Children’s Geographies have seen plenty of attention given to exploring, reflecting and debating the ethics of research with children. A simple keyword search of the journal’s online archive identifies 17 articles published by Children’s Geographies (since the first issue in 2003) with the words ethic, ethics, ethical or ethically in the title. That approximates to more than one article per year referring explicitly to ethics just in the title, with many more articles and journal content actually addressing ethical issues beyond the few words in the article title. Furthermore, the fourth ranked ‘most read’ article for the whole journal (also in the top 20 of the journal’s most cited articles) concerns ethical dilemmas of research with children and young people about their social environments (Morrow 2008). Children’s Geographies published a special issue on ethics in 2008, specifically on interdisciplinary perspectives in research ethics within child-focused research, which included a Viewpoint piece related to ethical concerns from Save the Children Scotland (King and Priestley 2008). Of further relevant note (ethics and rights being concepts that are closely linked), this was followed in 2009 by a special issue on children and the right to be researched properly. An editorial in 2016 claimed ‘Children’s geographers have traditionally been at the forefront in problematizing institutional ethical procedures and engagement in critical ethical practices beyond institutional requirements’ (Ergler et al. 2016, 134). As this journal Children’s Geographies is an international and multidisciplinary forum for debate and discussion about the geographical worlds of children, young people and their families, the issues of ethics, institutional review and publication (and their intersection) continue to be worth paying attention to, not least because they impinge on our readers, authors, editors and publishers, as well as all those who research children, youth and families and, of course, researched young people themselves. With regard to ethics and research, the contemporary landscape of academia (within which most of the researchers publishing in this journal are situated) is one of expanding and intensifying systems of governance in relation to research ethics. Within this context of the neo-liberal academy, there are two current trends that are pertinent: (i) seemingly ever-increasing pressures on academics to publish within narrowing parameters and (ii) the growing number of retractions of articles published in academic journals. Not surprisingly, concerns about research ethics and publishing are being raised with the establishment of initiatives like Retraction Watch, and questions being asked about academic integrity alongside suggestions that academic malpractice is on the rise

Fears for the future: the incommensurability of securitisation and in/securities among southern African youth

Abstract Over the past two decades, southern Africa has experienced both exceptionally high AIDS prevalence and recurrent food shortages. International institutions have responded to these challenges by framing them as security concerns that demand urgent intervention. Young people are implicated in both crises and drawn into the securitisation discourse as agents (of risk and protection) and as (potential) victims. However, the concepts of security deployed by global institutions and translated into national policy do not reflect the ways in/security is experienced ‘on the ground’ as a subjective and embodied orientation to the future. This paper brings work on youth temporalities to bear on social and cultural geographies of in/security and securitisation. It reports on research that explored insecurities among young people in Lesotho and Malawi. It concludes that, by focusing on ‘threats’ in isolation, and seeking to protect ‘society’ as an abstract aggregate of people, global securitisation discourses fail either to engage with the complex contextualised ways in which marginalised people experience insecurity or to proffer the political responses that are needed if those felt insecurities are to be addressed. However, while securitisation is problematic, in/security is nonetheless an important element in young people’s orientation to the future.