Yaw Ofosu-Kusi

Asking, giving, receiving : friendship as survival strategy among Accra's street children

This article considers friendship among street children in Accra. Drawing upon the findings of a three-year qualitative research project, the article argues that friendship is a neglected element of research yet cooperation, mutuality and exchange between friends are essential to street children’s survival. Living within the extremities of the urban informal sector, the article considers the existence of a strong ethos of ‘help’ between friends and how street children go about the (re) creation of friendship around those aspects of their lives essential for their daily survival.

Unofficial truths and everyday insights : understanding voice in visual research with the children of Accra's urban poor

This article draws upon the use of photography to research the lives of children living in Accra, Ghana. Its aim is to consider method in visual research, and to reflect upon those modes of explanation and understanding that any consideration of method must require. It suggests a role for photography as a ‘vector’, as something capable of connecting our knowledge and understanding of the everyday with the everyday experiences and reality of others. Drawing upon the photographs and spoken testimonies of children who live and work on the street, and of children who live in a large informal settlement, the article advances an intimate connection between photography and knowledge of the everyday reality of childrens lives, most evident in the capacity of childrens photographs to surprise and highlight the fallibility of our understandings.

Researching with, not on:using photography in researching street children in Accra, Ghana

What is discussed in this chapter is work-in-progress, an opportunity for reflection upon elements of an on-going research project examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. Street children have received much research in recent years but our project is, we believe, distinctive in two respects. The first of these is that access to reliable data on the growing presence of children on the streets of African cities is often problematic. Available research is often diffuse and hard to access, it is more often than not driven by the short-term requirements of specific programmes and interventions and as a consequence can be lacking in depth, rigour and innovation. Without the means to provide a sufficiently self-conscious and critical engagement with accepted understandings of the lives of street children, consideration of the experience of street children in Africa continues to rely heavily on the more capacious and better disseminated research from the Americas (e.g., Mickelson, 2000). At the very least, Africas specific experience of large population displacements, diversity of family forms, rapid urbanisation, vigorous structural adjustment and internal conflict raise important questions about the appropriateness of such ready generalisations. Judith Ennew (2003, p. 4) is clear that caution is needed in an uncritical endorsement of the “globalisation of the street child based on Latin American work”. She is equally mindful, however, that as far as Africa is concerned the absence of reliable evidence continues to hinder debate.

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.

Neoliberalism and Housing Provision in Accra, Ghana: The Illogic of an Over-Liberalised Housing Market

The economic hardships experienced by African countries in the late 1970s forced many of them to fall on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for financial relief. The two institutions’ reaction in almost all cases was to impose structural adjustment programmes (SAP) on those countries in an attempt to stabilize and grow their economies through market forces, with little intervention from the state. Ghana became an unwilling apostle from 1983 when it implemented various rounds of the programme because of the deplorable state of its economy. The country became so committed to structural adjustment that it was portrayed as an extraordinary example of the efficacy of neo-liberal policies in restructuring broken economies. Primary among the benefits to the country was economic liberalization and a corresponding increase in domestic and foreign private investments, especially in the housing industry. Since then, Accra, the national capital, has faced an overproduction of housing for high-income earners thus leading to a dramatic rise of gated communities. On the other hand however, there has been virtually no production of housing for low-income earners, thus exacerbating their continued dependence on the informal sector for housing provision in Accra. With this stark difference, the paper argues that the neoliberal policies of the 1980s have rendered government irrelevant in the housing market, especially in the provision of housing for low income earners, and for that reason accelerated the development of poor housing and slums in the city of Accra.

Engaging with a world outside of ourselves:vistas of flatness, children's work and the urban informal economy

This paper considers the work and labour of children living on the streets of Accra, Ghana. It does so in two distinctive ways. First, it considers how the childrens photographs of a day or two in their working lives, and the dialogues that go on in, through and around them, may contribute to the making of strong sociological arguments about childrens work. In so doing, this paper elaborates the connections between visual sociology and realist traditions of photography, and argues that photographs can contribute distinctive and novel sources of insight into working childrens lives and a powerful, humanising media of dissemination. Second, these arguments are then deployed to examine street childrens experiences of work. Conceptualised in terms of its ‘flatness’, the paper explores the informal means of regulation through which the children are locked into types of working that prove difficult to escape.