Child Migration in Africa

Child Migration in Africa explores the mobility of children without their parents within West Africa. Drawing on the experiences of children from rural Burkina Faso and Ghana, the book provides rich material on the circumstances of children's voluntary migration and their experiences of it. Their accounts challenge the normative ideals of what a 'good' childhood is, which often underlie public debates about children's migration, education and work in developing countries.

The comparative study of Burkina Faso and Ghana highlights that social networks operate in ways that can be both enabling and constraining for young migrants, as can cultural views on age- and gender-appropriate behaviour. The book questions easily made assumptions regarding children's experiences when migrating independently of their parents and contributes to analytical and cross-cultural understandings of childhood.

Part of the groundbreaking Africa Now series, Child Migration in Africa is an important and timely contribution to an under-researched area.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction: Interrogating Childhood and Migration
2. Contexts of Migration
3. Choosing to Move: The Reasons of Rural Children's Migration
4: Journeys and Arrivals: Introductions to New Social Worlds
5: Navigating Migrant Life: Processes of Constructing Identities
6. Moving On

About the Authors:

Dorte Thorsen is a visiting research fellow at the department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading. She has done ethnographic research with children and youth migrating from the Bisa region in south-eastern Burkina Faso to Ouagadougou and Abidjan and with their rural families in some twenty villages. Raising methodological questions about the way in which children's and youth's agency can be studied beyond a narrow focus on verbal negotiations, her research theorises decision-making processes linked with young migrants' performance of identities, urban labour relations and the enactment of relatedness. She has published book chapters and policy papers based on this research, and articles in the journals Migrations & Hommes, Africa, Forum for Development Studies and the Journal for Comparative Family Studies.

Iman Hashim is a Research Fellow at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Kulutur University. She has worked on children's independent migration from rural north-eastern Ghana to rural and urban central Ghana. Her current work builds on long-term ethnographic research undertaken in a farming community in north-eastern Ghana, where she focussed on the work of children for their own households, as well as on community attitudes toward education and children's experiences of education. She also has worked for national and international non-governmental organisations as a programme and a research officer.