Tatek Abebe

Changing Livelihoods, Changing Childhoods: Patterns of Children's Work in Rural Southern Ethiopia

Abstract This article explores the dynamics of childrens work among the Gedeo ethnic community in southern Ethiopia. It examines how a shift in livelihood strategies, accompanied by unfair trade, the HIV/AIDS epidemic and neo-liberal policies, is affecting the survival strategies of children within families. The growing significance of export-led crops like coffee over the local subsistence economy has changed rural livelihoods. With plummeting coffee prices in the global market, the migration of adult members of the household to secure off-farm employment has altered childrens domestic work patterns. The change includes increasing pressure for childrens participation in multiple reproductive and income-generating activities. The cash economy, while giving children and young people the opportunity to contribute to family livelihoods, is accelerating age- and gender-based divisions of labor with more boys engaging in the production and sale of commercial crops than girls. It has also led their participation in deeply unequal and exploitative system of international trade. The article concludes by placing childrens changing re-productive activities at the heart of structural and North–South relations in trade and development.

Social Actors and Victims of Exploitation Working children in the cash economy of Ethiopia's South

This article explores the role of children in household livelihoods among the Gedeo ethnic community in Ethiopia. Three themes are discussed — reproductive activities, entrepreneurial work in marketplaces and sociospatial mobility — in the context of recent theoretical debates over childrens agency and social competence. With shifts in rural livelihoods, children have developed new agentic and entrepreneurial skills in domestic work, trade and migration. This agency is negotiated in everyday life, but it is also structurally highly circumscribed. Situating childrens work within post-rural economic development offers insight into the ways in which regional and global political economy shape their local livelihoods.

EARNING A LIVING ON THE MARGINS: BEGGING, STREET WORK AND THE SOCIO-SPATIAL EXPERIENCES OF CHILDREN IN ADDIS ABABA

Abstract This paper explores the everyday life experiences of boys and girls who beg on the streets in Addis Ababa. Based on seven months of child‐focused research, it discusses begging as an often overlooked but crucial aspect of social reproduction in which children earn resources in order to contribute towards their household livelihoods. It is argued that child beggars are not passive victims of their circumstances, but are aware of the fact that begging is not a perpetual predicament in their lives. Moreover, the activity of begging is complex and fluid, and is based on the changing nature of the childrens experiences, livelihoods and socio‐economic conditions. Age, gender, social maturity and availability (or lack) of alternative income‐generating strategies are important variables shaping both their spatio‐temporal participation in and withdrawal from the activity. The perception of the public towards the childrens involvement in begging and the childrens own perceptions and reactions to it differ. The findings suggest that, as opposed to most children who construct their engagement as shikella, or simply business, the public has an ambivalent attitude, associating children with aspects of the culture of poverty, and considering them either ‘at’ risk or ‘as’ risks. The study concludes that interventions to improve these childrens lives need to take more seriously their transient experiences, resources and social skills.

Multiple methods, complex dilemmas: negotiating socio-ethical spaces in participatory research with disadvantaged children

The paper explores the methodological and socio-ethical dilemmas of researching with disadvantaged children in two contrasting fieldwork settings in Ethiopia. The challenges of adhering to dominant, ‘Western’ ethical principles and of creating and sharing ethical spaces during fieldwork are discussed. It is argued that research ethics originating in the Global North entail standards that are difficult to apply in social, cultural and economic contexts elsewhere, and that these needed to be reworked in reflexive ways during fieldwork. The indeterminate nature of grounded field research and the fluidity of its unfolding directions, not only make the contextualization of universal ethics in local ethos about childhood necessary. The paper also highlights how fieldwork with children is a morally contested terrain embedded in and through personal, social and ethical spatiality (Soja 2001, Massey 2005). Some questions are raised that require further consideration in research with children in similar circumstances.

Dominant Discourses, Debates and Silences on Child Labour in Africa and Asia

Abstract Drawing on the relevant literature, this article explores key debates and controversies on child labour in the context of Africa and Asia. It first identifies and analyses three dominant discourses on child labour: 1) the work-free childhoods perspective; 2) the socio-cultural perspective; and 3) the political economy perspective. Against the backdrop of these discourses, the article goes on to critically examine aspects of child labour that are underrepresented in the literature and in international policy circles. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding childrens gendered work within the complex material social practices of interconnected histories and geographies in which their livelihoods unfold.

Reflexivity and Dialogue: Methodological and Socio-Ethical Dilemmas in Research with HIV-Affected Children in East Africa

This paper presents an integrated discussion of methods and ethics by drawing on participatory research with children in Ethiopia and Kenya. It examines the complex social, ethical, practical and methodological dilemmas of research with HIV-affected children, and explores how we confronted some of these dilemmas before, during and after fieldwork. The paper interrogates the role and limitations of ‘global’ ethical standards in childhood research, and the ways in which the researchers’ gender, ethnicity/race, material power, knowledge and insider-outsider position all intersect to affect: (a) the level of childrens involvement in the research process; (b) the generation of knowledge about the field; and (c) the negotiation of ethics in collaborative ways. We argue that doing ethical research with HIV-affected children should not be based solely on dominant and de-contextualised understandings of ethics, knowledge and social relations, but should be negotiated reflexively and through dialogue with participants, including the children, their guardians and ‘local’ community members—all with the aim of doing good and avoiding harm in the research process.

Beyond pluralizing African childhoods: Introduction

This Special Issue of Childhood moves beyond stereotypical images of African children to document the complex ways in which contemporary realities and processes of social transformations shape and are shaped by children’s everyday lives. In this editorial, we bring together perspectives that are drawn from 10 articles that report findings from six countries: Zambia, Rwanda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Uganda and Ghana. The insights generated reveal the importance of looking beyond the ‘deficit’ model of childhood to instead theorize how children, through their engagements in social, economic, cultural and political life, contribute to the reconfiguration of social and generational dynamics that unfolds in Africa.

Begging as a Livelihood Pathway of Street Children in Addis Ababa

Abstract This article explores the working lives of street children in Addis Ababa, focusing in particular on an analysis of begging. Based on participatory research approaches, it discusses the social and economic significance of begging for impoverished children, documenting what they beg for, how and why, as well as what they think about their involvement in the activity. It is argued that although begging is a way of life that some children have followed since early childhood, for others it is merely a pastime activity, and a temporary survival strategy from which they will eventually ‘move on’. The practice of begging is complex and fluid, largely depending on the changing nature of childrens livelihood pathways, economic capacity, and relations with both the public and their families. Many children view begging as a shameful activity that they would prefer to avoid if they had alternatives. However, a large majority also consider it as a central part of their lives—as ‘work’—through which they can fulfil the expectations of their parents and share responsibilities as members of their household. The conclusion is that interventions to improve the livelihoods of these children need to take more seriously the structural constraints of poverty and exclusion, as well as childrens mobility, transient experiences, and social skills.

‘Global/local’ research on children and childhood in a ‘global society’

KARL HANSON: To start our conversation, I wonder if you would think of your own research as ‘global’ or as ‘local’ research? Also, how do you understand the terms ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘globalized’ childhood? Do you personally find these terms useful/ productive? STUART AITKEN: For some time now, I’ve been persuaded by the notion of flat ontologies. Sally Marston and her colleagues David Woodward and J.P. Jones published the now famous piece in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (Marston et al., 2005) that looked at the production of scale for what it was: precisely that, a production. They argued for an intense focus on flat networks and relationalities rather than hierarchical scales, and that is how I like to proceed with my own work with children and young people. I’ve published books on children and globalization, youth activists jumping scale (to use the term of the late, great Neil Smith, 1992) to affect national and international politics, the impact of neoliberal forms of governance on young people and so forth, and it always seems to come down to (if you will pardon the pun) engagement and aesthetics (the latter formed by the ideas of Jacques Rancière). My empirical work these days looks at young people as part of communities of care rather than scaled communities. Now, it is possible for some people (politicians, CEOs) to create scales and hierarchies to shut young people down so I do not want to diminish the politics behind the production of scale, but for me, at least at the moment, I am very much concerned with reproduction in the sense that Elizabeth Grosz and others use that term. I want to use the term reproduction here in perhaps a more expansive way than it is used by contemporary feminists like Grosz, Cindi Katz, Katharyne Mitchell and others, as the potential for young people to reproduce and remake themselves differently. The importance of the right to create and recreate themselves and their spaces is in the best interests of young people (and adults) and, as a consequence, the focus on spatial rights is not only about occupying spaces that are suitable for access to housing, livelihoods and education but also the right to stay put as well as right of movement and 779480 CHD0010.1177/0907568218779480ChildhoodHanson et al. research-article2018

Tensions and controversies regarding child labor in small-scale gold mining in Ghana

Abstract The recent resurgence in small-scale mining in Ghana has coincided with falling enrolments in schools, leading to public concerns about the participation of children and young people in mining work. The engagement of children and young people in gold mining is also perceived to diminish efforts to improve education, inviting abolitionist actions from the government. This has created tension between government and its functionaries on one hand and young workers and their families on the other. Drawing on qualitative research, this article explores controversies around young people’s involvement in small-scale mining and governments’ efforts to curtail it in Amansie West District, Ghana. We discuss the tensions between securing individual/household livelihoods and societal interest in reducing child labor. The study findings underscore not only the importance of work in the lives of young workers and their households but also its positive implications for educational pursuits as well as for future livelihood prospects. Whereas the abolitionist framework emphasizes children’s right to education, it fails to acknowledge that the income generated through work makes schooling possible for most children. We conclude that policies rooted in global ideologies of work-free childhoods are at odds with prevailing sociocultural and economic realities.