Ambiguous agency: critical perspectives on social interventions with children and youth in Africa

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Notes

This editorial and most articles in this special issue use the terms children, youth and young people interchangeably to refer to people under the age of 25 years (United Nations 1989).

The seeds for this special issue were sown some time back at a seminar hosted by the Centre for Child-Focussed Anthropological Research at Brunel University, ‘Emerging Perspectives on the Anthropology of Childhood’ in May 2008. This led, a year later, to a panel at the European Conference on African Studies in Leipzig, organised by Lorenzo Bordonaro, focussing on the ‘deviant’ children of Africa.

We use the term ‘social interventions’ to refer to all kinds of programmes and policies, usually delivered by NGOs, governments and international development agencies, aimed at children and youth, in practice, at the grassroots.

The notion of a ‘global childhood’ is based on an alleged natural and universal distinction between children and adults and has been formed in Western world imaginations and exported through processes of colonialism, the forces of globalisation, international development organisations and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Boyden 1990). Whilst it is, therefore, limited in its understanding and conceptualisation of childhood (Stephens 1995, Burman 1996, White 1996, 1999, Nieuwenhuys 1998, Bessell 1999, Katz 2004); it has nonetheless become an ideal against which all childhoods should be measured (Stephens 1995, Bessell 1999).