"Vulnerable children, violent youth in Eastern Africa"
Prof. Mildred Ndeda, Kenyatta University will present the ongoing research program (ANR).
"Conflicting realities: Kenyan childhood ethos and the CRC* ethic"
Dr Yvan Droz, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva), IFRA associated researcher.
The Kenyan common "childhood ethos" follows a few fundamental principles: rites of passages, a child belongs to a family and has to give back the "present of life" and s/he has to pay respect to her/his relatives. The Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC) advocates a universalistic catalogue of children's rights that originate in a culturally specific conception of children: the "precious child" of 20th century modernity. This conception, grounded in an ethic –an explicit politico‐philosophical system– is confronted with the Kenyan ethos as an implicit system of values. Does this conception of children make sense in the Kenyan childhood ethos?
*Convention on the Rights of Children
"Intimacy and inequality: investigating local childcare chains in Nairobi"
Dr. Ambreena Manji, Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
In this research, we have investigated the arrangements that women make in order to enable them to enter formal work and the more informal, tenuous and unstable childcare arrangements made by poor women who rely on older siblings, other women or poorly provisioned day‐care centres in order to go to work. We contrast therefore the 'doubly mothered child' with the child who receives what we call 'survival' or 'custodial' mothering. The work will result in a paper to be co‐authored by Margarita Dimova (Former Graduate Attachee, BIEA), Carrie Hough (Graduate Attachee, BIEA), Kerry Kyaa (BIEA Research Fellow) and Dr. Ambreena Manji.
The seminar will be chaired by Dr. Jerome Lafargue, French Institute for Research in Africa.
