Increasing children's participation in African transport planning: reflections on methodological issues in a child-centred research project

Abstract

This paper examines the potential for applying child-centred research methodologies which involve children doing their own research (with adult facilitators) within a transport and mobility context in West Africa. Relatively little attention has been paid to the transport needs of the poor and powerless within African transport policy and planning: the specifics of children and young people's transport and mobility needs are essentially unknown and unconsidered. Using evidence from a small pilot study in Ghana, we reflect on both the opportunities and the challenges of work in this field. Although the paper is focused on the specific issues raised by child-centred research, it raises broader questions regarding the potential for research partnerships with vulnerable groups and, more specifically, the challenges of developing more collaborative research processes within transport studies, where technical priorities still regularly triumph over social concerns.

Keywords:

• child-centred research
• participation
• transport
• Ghana
• Africa
• methodology

Acknowledgements

This paper draws on research funded by the UK Department for International Development. However, the UK Department for International Development can accept no responsibility for any information provided or views expressed.

We wish to thank our child collaborators in Ghana: Basil, Anthony, Priscilla, Celia, Samuel, David, Ben, Gloria, Ibrahim, Kate, Sebastian and Patience and the university staff who supported the field research. Thanks are also due to our child and adult collaborators in India and South Africa, to the International Forum for Rural Transport and Development secretariat, and to Kate Hampshire (University of Durham), who participated in the wider project. We owe a particular debt to collaborating staff at CWC, Bangalore, who introduced us to the concept and practice of child-centred research. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the conference on Emerging issues in the geographies of children and youth, Brunel University, May 2005.

Notes

1. Children—as Alderson (2001) points out—is an awkward word to cover teenagers. Nevertheless, it is used in the paper as a blanket term to apply to children and young people up to the age of 20. We do not use the term youth because, in a West African context, this can extend into the mid 30s, especially in the case of men.

2. The Research Assessment Exercise in UK and similar exercises elsewhere have led to university departments putting pressures on their staff regarding acceptable research areas. Until recently, for example, this has often militated against inter-disciplinary research.

3. The Country Consultative Groups were established to help shape the project by providing additional expertise (as well as for subsequent dissemination of findings). The aim was to select key partners who would need to be involved in helping to improve children's mobility and access. These varied but tended to include NGOs, government departments (transport), local government staff, transport union representatives and academics.

4. The children and NGO staff involved in the India project have plans to produce a book on their experiences.

5. Cape Coast University was once primarily a teacher training institute.

6. In India, with the participating NGO's assistance, children developed a set of criteria and then selected their representatives to participate in this project.

7. A police representative, for instance, commented how much she had learnt about children being harassed in the transport context, while the Minister for Roads and Transport spoke on a wide range of issues, including the role of parents and communities, the high incidence of children as traffic accident victims, the new Road Traffic Act, and the fact that society has not learnt enough about children's mobility needs and how they see the issues.

8. This may have been prompted, at least in part, by an NGO poster about adult imperialism on the wall of the meeting room.

9. Children should ideally select their own representatives to participate in the study (i.e., children with a range of skills and abilities to undertake the research and then take the findings forward). The Bhima Sanghas in Karnataka, India, have developed a reservation system to ensure potentially under-represented groups such as the disabled are included (reflecting reservation approaches utilised in government in India).

10. Since the first draft of this paper was written, the authors and associated collaborators have obtained funding from ESRC/DFID for a larger three-country study in sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Malawi, South Africa) which will help take this research forward. This study will incorporate both child researcher and adult researcher strands.

11. A recent review of Uganda's Participatory Poverty Programme, for instance, shows that children offer important insights into poverty issues and actually provide a more nuanced view of poverty than adults, emphasising related personal, emotional, spiritual and family issues, and a more positive perspective on fighting the factors that cause it (Witter and Bukokhe 2004).

12. Italics in the original.