Power, agency and children’s time use in rural Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT

Children’s time allocation plays an important role in their well-being, education and future chances in life. This paper examines children’s time use in rural Sierra Leone in the context of dynamics of power. It analyses the ways in which children co-construct their patterns of time use and create their own temporal spaces within the boundaries of existing expectations and norms. Drawing on rich qualitative data we argue that children’s routines are shaped by an interplay of various dimensions and expressions of power that create and re-create gender, generation and other social orders in a particular society. This power interplay creates polyphonic temporal spaces where school, work and play time overlap each other.The analysis of this polyphony of time use has demonstrated that children’s time allocation goes beyond simple one dimensional task distribution and includes a complex network of activities that may take place simultaneously.

KEYWORDS:

• Time use
• power
• children’s agency Sierra Leone
• sub-Saharan Africa
• polyphony

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As children have limited idea of clock time and usually do not have access to watches, they could not give precise descriptions of how much time they spent on each task, but rather used a vague descriptions as ‘whole afternoon’ ‘till the sunset’, ‘many hours’, etc.

2 Children can of course also exercise their power over other children, creating complex relations within children’s groups. However, these dynamics among children lie outside the scope of this paper.

3 A game usually played by girls, when two girls throw a ball to each other and the third girl stays between them and tries to escape the ball. If the ball hits her, she loses the game.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Concern Worldwide.