Supporting ‘Young Carers’ in Kenya: From Policy Paralysis to Action

Abstract

African children who care for sick or dying adults are receiving less than optimal support due to confusion about whether or not young caregiving constitutes a form of child labour and the tendency of the authorities to play it “safe” and side with more abolitionist approaches to children's work, avoiding engagement with support strategies that could be seen as support of child labour. To challenge this view, and move from policy paralysis to action, we present a study from western Kenya that explores community perceptions of children's work and caregiving as well as opportunities for support. The study draws on 17 community group conversations and 10 individual interviews, involving 283 members of a Luo community in the Bondo District of western Kenya. We provide a detailed account of how integral children's work is to household survival in the context of poverty, HIV and AIDS as well as community recommendations on how they and external service providers can work together in supporting children faced with excessive caregiving and income-generation responsibilities. We use our findings to call for less restrictive regulations of children's work and to develop a plan for policy and action for young carers that identifies key actors, their roles and responsibilities, and how they might best collaborate—in a way that is sensitive both to concerns about child labour as well as community strengths, resources and apprehensions about the stigmatisation of children targeted by agencies.

Keywords:

• Young Caregiving
• Childhood
• Multisectoral Responses
• Community Involvement
• Child Labour
• Policy
• Africa

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all our informants for their active participation and the Higher Education Innovation Fund at the London School of Economics for funding the community conversations and this research.

Notes

1. Cheney (2013) considers ways to shift the implementation of children's rights-based aid approaches from protectionism, which hinders orphans and vulnerable children's (OVCs) survival strategies, to empowerment in order to transform OVC livelihoods. I emphasise children's citizenship as a means of increasing OVC participation in policy-making.