Nicola Ansell

Children's Migration as a Household/Family Strategy: Coping With AIDS in Lesotho and Malawi

This article examines the diverse ways in which southern African households/families employ childrens migration as a strategy to enable them to cope with the impacts of HIV/AIDS. Based on qualitative research with both guardians and migrant children, it explores how decisions are made concerning where children should live. Such decisions are aimed at both meeting childrens needs and also using their capacities in meeting wider household needs. Hence strategies adopted are often compromises, based on the sense of obligation of individual relatives, household resources and needs, the perceived needs and capabilities of children, and childrens own preferences.

Enabling households to support successful migration of AIDS orphans in southern Africa

Most southern African orphans are cared for by extended families but the implications of the spatial dispersal of such families are seldom recognized: orphans often have to migrate to new homes and communities. This paper, based on qualitative research conducted with children and guardians in urban and rural Lesotho and Malawi, examines orphans’ migration experiences in order to assess how successful migration might best be supported. Most children found migration traumatic in the short term, but over time many settled into new environments. Although much AIDS policy in southern Africa stresses the role of communities, the burden of care lay with extended family households. Failed migrations, which resulted in renewed migration and trauma, were attributable to one of two household-level causes: orphans feeling ill-treated in their new families or changes in guardians’ circumstances. Policy interventions to reduce disruption and trauma for young AIDS migrants should aim at facilitating sustainable arrangements by enabling suitable households to provide care. Reducing the economic costs of caring for children, particularly school-related costs, would: allow children to stay with those relatives (e.g. grandparents) best able to meet their non-material needs; reduce resentment of foster children in impoverished households; and diminish the need for multiple migrations.

Fluid Households, Complex Families: The Impacts of Children's Migration as a Response to HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa*

Abstract The fluidity of southern African families is related to a long history of internal and external migration. Currently, HIV/AIDS is having a dramatic impact on extended family structures, with the migration of individual members employed as a coping strategy. Childrens migration is one aspect of this that is often distinct from that undertaken by other household members. This article is based on qualitative research conducted in Lesotho and Malawi with young migrants and the households that receive them. It examines the processes of fragmentation and re-formation of households through the movements of children that are taking place in response to HIV/AIDS, and explores the impacts these processes have on young migrants and the households they join.

Children's Experiences of Migration: Moving in the Wake of AIDS in Southern Africa

Despite the recent significance childrens geographies have been afforded within many geographical subdisciplines, their experiences of migration have received relatively little attention. However, children do migrate and their migration is often distinct from that of entire households. In this paper we explore childrens migration in southern Africa within the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, focusing in particular on the impacts of moving house on childrens sociospatial experiences. Migration has consequences for several areas of childrens lives, and the nature of those consequences is shaped by the context within which migration takes place. In southern Africa AIDS is an unavoidable aspect of the sociospatial context, but the impact it has on children varies. This exemplar has wider implications for two areas of geographical research. First, in the paper we advocate the importance of including childrens experiences of migration within culturally informed studies of migration. Second, there is a need for research in childrens geographies to extend beyond the microlevel. We advocate a refocusing of research beyond childrens static relationship to environments to also encompass childrens transient geographies in discussions of their life experiences.

Secondary Education Reform in Lesotho and Zimbabwe and the Needs of Rural Girls: Pronouncements, policy and practice

Analysis of the educational needs of rural girls in Lesotho and Zimbabwe suggests a number of shortcomings in the current form of secondary education, and ways in which it might be modified so as to serve this sizeable group of students better. Several of the shortcomings, notably in relation to curricular irrelevance and excessive focus on examinations, have long been recognised, including by politicians. Yet political pronouncements are seldom translated into policy, and even where policy is formulated, reforms are seldom implemented in schools. This paper makes use of interviews with educational decision-makers in the two southern African countries and a range of documentary sources to explore why, despite the considerable differences between the two contexts, much needed educational reforms have been implemented in neither.

`Of course we must be equal, but … ': imagining gendered futures in two rural southern African secondary schools

Based on focus group discussions held with students at rural secondary schools in Lesotho and Zimbabwe, this paper argues that secondary schools provide important spaces for the (re)construction of gendered identities among rural girls in southern Africa. Central to processes of identity formation in rural secondary schools are normative discourses centring on notions of ‘culture’ and ‘equal rights’. These discourses are (re)produced in secondary schools and are appropriated by students in making sense of their lives. Both are ambiguously related to dominant gender ideologies and are mobilised by students in ways which do not simply conform to an accommodation/resistance dichotomy. Also highlighted is the complex articulation of identity production and materiality. Identities are constructed in the context of the school in relation to expected material performance in contexts removed in time and space. The ‘culture’ and ‘equal rights’ discourses are understood and negotiated in relation to expectations of future lives beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the school: lives imagined in relation to particular (generally urban) geographical contexts.

Young AIDS migrants in Southern Africa: policy implications for empowering children

Many AIDS-affected children in southern Africa engage in migration when household members fall sick or die from AIDS, or because they are sent to assist relatives. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the consequences of these movements for childrens lives. Multi-method research, conducted in Lesotho and Malawi, revealed that children sent to live with kin commonly move over long distances and between urban and rural areas. They are generally not consulted or informed about these migrations and face a range of associated difficulties, particularly with integrating into new families and communities. Severed family ties exacerbate the difficulties faced by children who end up in institutions or on the streets. This paper advocates that policy approaches for those affected by AIDS should be children-centred and take into account the implications of migration at three levels. First, many of the difficulties children face could be overcome if they were familiar with the place and people they were moving to. Second, children would be better able to cope with new situations if they were included in family discussions with decision-makers regarding their migration preferences. Third, maintaining ties with kin would ensure that children do not become distanced from their family and cultural heritage, which is essential for post-institutional support.

Producing knowledge about ‘Third World women’: The politics of fieldwork in a Zimbabwean secondary school

Fieldwork is a project in which, according to Rose (1997, p. 316), researcher, researched and research make each other, yet far more attention has been given to the making of the research and researcher than to the researched. Focusing on three aspects of the research process (the researchers presence in the field, the research topic and the choice of methods), this paper uses examples from the authors own fieldwork to debate whether it is possible to shape fieldwork such that the knowledges created and consumed in the field by the researched serve to destabilise dominant discourses of race, gender and age.

Participatory feedback and dissemination with and for children: Reflections from research with young migrants in southern Africa

Abstract In this contribution we discuss the process of feedback and dissemination that we adopted following research with children affected by AIDS in southern Africa. We outline our reasons for engaging in detailed feedback and dissemination, distinguishing between active or passive processes and discuss the participatory methods we adopted. Through our reflections we consider feedback as an obligation to participants and dissemination as a potential agent of social change. In addition we evaluate the effectiveness with which we were able to truly incorporate the voices of young people in our dissemination and relinquish control of the outcomes to make them available for action among policy-makers. In conclusion we highlight that active dissemination, although not able to guarantee that research recommendations will be acted upon, at the very least opens dialogue and enhances understanding among those able to implement action.

Third World Gap Year Projects: Youth Transitions and the Mediation of Risk:

In recent years in the UK there has been a great expansion in the number of young people travelling to Third World countries between school and university in order to participate as volunteers on structured gap year projects. Travel to such places is commonly perceived as ‘risky’, and takes young people outside the protective cocoon of UK health and safety legislation. One of the functions played by the providers of gap year projects is to mediate risk. On the basis of analysis of promotional literature, interviews with organisers of gap year projects, and focus groups of returned volunteers, in this paper I argue that the various strategies of risk mediation undertaken by gap year providers serve to reconcile modernising tendencies in UK society toward risk control and structure with postmodern inclinations towards individualisation and uncertainty.