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"Children Africa Social conditions 21st century."
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Safe water, sanitation, and early childhood malnutrition in East Africa
To understand safe water and sanitation in East Africa, it is important to consider the contributions of African feminist analysis. This perspective will unveil inequities in the distribution of resources, demonstrate how localized solutions which are driven by women’s collaborative work have had an impact by temporarily easing the burden, and paint a multilayered picture of the lives of women and girls who are the predominant providers of water to households. This book explores the effects of water and sanitation quality and availability on early childhood morbidity in East Africa from an African feminist sociological perspective. It presents a framework that considers the ways that the development industry, neoliberalism, neocolonial relations, gender, class, ethnicity, globalization, and other dimensions of oppression intersect to impact upon the experiences and agency of women and children accessing clean water and safe sanitation and reducing early childhood morbidity in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. This work offers a vital contribution to the social scientific literature by adapting the vibrant intellectual work of African feminists to a quantitative methodology and enlarging the scope of empirically and theoretically grounded studies within the field of environmental sociology.
eBook
Ordinary Violence and Social Change in Africa
Ordinary social violence, - recurrent mental or physical aggression occurring between closely related people - structures social relationships. This book presents anthropological case studies from different parts of Africa to show how this 'hidden' violence is essential to understand social change.
eBook
Sex and salvation
Sex and Salvation chronicles the coming of age of a generation of women in Tamatave in the years that followed Madagascar’s economic liberalization. Eager to forge a viable future amid poverty and rising consumerism, many young women have entered the sexual economy in hope of finding a European husband. Just as many Westerners believe that young people break with the past as they enter adulthood, Malagasy citizens fear that these women have severed the connection to their history and culture. Jennifer Cole’s elegant analysis shows how this notion of generational change is both wrong and consequential. It obscures the ways young people draw on long-standing ideas of gender and sexuality, it ignores how urbanites relate to their rural counterparts, and it neglects the relationship between these husband-seeking women and their elders who join Pentecostal churches. And yet, as talk about the women circulates through the city’s neighborhoods, bars, Internet cafes, and churches, it teaches others new ways of being. Cole’s sophisticated depiction of how a generation’s coming of age contributes to social change eschews a narrow focus on crisis. Instead, she reveals how fantasies of rupture and conceptions of the changing life course shape the everyday ways that people create the future.
eBook
Transitions to adulthood in men and women in rural Malawi in the 21st century using sequence analysis
Many sub-Saharan African countries have large populations of young people, and these cohorts have the potential to bring significant change. Understanding the changing lives of young people is important for ensuring individuals experience healthy and successful transitions to adulthood and for understanding how best to ensure they realise their full potential, for themselves and their communities. This analysis used detailed, prospectively collected data on men and women from the Karonga Health and Demographic Surveillance Site in rural Malawi between 2004-2017. Multi-channel sequence analysis was conducted for the domains of leaving school, getting married, and having children. Sequences were grouped into clusters and descriptive and multinomial logistic regression carried out to assess differences in the transition to adulthood by sex, calendar time, and sociodemographic factors. Many participants followed a fairly early and rapid transition to adulthood; however, a sizable proportion experienced later marriage. These participants were split into those (mostly men) who received little education and had a long delay between school-leaving and marrying, and those who spent longer in education. Access to secondary school increased over time for both men and women, while only women experienced delays in age at marriage. Where associations between sociodemographic factors and transitions to adulthood were found, they suggested that greater access to resources was associated with a later transition out of education, and therefore to marriage.
Journal Article
AFRICA'S PROSPECTS FOR ENJOYING A DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND
We assess Africa's prospects for enjoying a demographic dividend. While fertility rates and dependency ratios in Africa remain high, they have started to decline. According to UN projections, they will fall further in the coming decades such that by the mid-21st century, the ratio of the working age to dependent population will be greater than in Asia, Europe, and Northern America. This projection suggests Africa has considerable potential to enjoy a demographic dividend. Whether and when it actually materializes, and also its magnitude, hinges on policies and institutions in key realms that include macroeconomic management, human capital, trade, governance, and labor and capital markets. Given strong complementarities among these areas, coordinated policies will likely be most effective in generating the momentum needed to pull Africa's economies out of a development trap.
Journal Article
Persistence of High Fertility in Tropical Africa: The Case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The article explores how geography, history, and society have shaped childbearing behaviors over the last half-century, and how they are now being reshaped by modernity and the exigencies of urban life, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The decline of prolonged postpartum abstinence and involuntary childlessness initially raised fertility to high levels (6—7 children per woman). More recently, socioeconomic differentials in fertility have emerged, suggesting that the country may be entering a phase of fertility decline. A full-blown transition, however, seems still a remote prospect. Supported both by cultural traditions and by economic rationality, Congo's people remain largely convinced of the benefits of many children for their own and their kin's security. While an eventual fertility transition may be taken for granted, the article examines the many hurdles, contradictions, and tensions that will have to be overcome to achieve that outcome.
Journal Article
Womanhood and girlhood in twenty-first-century middle class Kenya
This study of twenty first century girlhoods and womanhoods charts a new area of scholarship on Kenya. The chapters investigate questions related to how new rituals of girlhood and womanhood that materialize when religious, indigenous, and foreign worlds encounter each other are re-structuring family and society, recasting roles, and informing fresh conceptualizations of African girlhood and womanhood. The author’s interdisciplinary analysis and writing journeys through the different stages of girlhood and womanhood as ritualized by Kenya’s 21st century middle class, and teases out the implications of these peculiarities to identity (re)creation and the restructuring of societies’ organs, and traditionally gendered institutions. Applying a critical African studies lens, the arguments in this book center women as originators of action and thought without inquiring into a male other. Essentially, this work disrupts patri-centered constructions and examinations of female bodies and identities. The resulting deductions inform on the substratum of Kenyan girls and women’s self-definitions as manifest through their experiences and ritualized practices, and articulate the impact of the performances of these bodies and identities on Kenyan and global societies.
eBook
Foundation phase pre-service teachers’ experiences of teaching life skills during teaching practice
Background In South Africa socio-economic problems such as poor health conditions, juvenile delinquency, high rates of school dropout and teenage pregnancy are increasing. Therefore, it is vital to prepare foundation phase (FP) pre-service teachers to fortify children with basic life skills (LS) that will help them to cope with real-world challenges and demands. Aim The study is aimed to explore the experiences of pre-service FPLS teachers during their teaching practice. Setting This qualitative case study was conducted in the FP department of a teacher-training institution at a South African university. Methods Twenty final-year pre-service teachers were purposively selected to participate in semi-structured interviews and reflective writing exercises. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data, and the classification of the emerging themes was informed by Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. Results The findings revealed pre-service teachers' experience of support from mentors, a struggle with implementation of FP curriculum, realities of classroom interaction, inefficient language of interaction for the FP classroom, and a lack of awareness of the importance of LS as a subject. Conclusion The study argues that to improve the pedagogy of future LS teachers, a review and reform of the LS teacher-training curriculum are necessary. This curriculum needs to provide more extensive micro-teaching that promotes teachers' general proficiency in the home languages of their learners and equips them with effective teaching strategies. The implementation of the LS curriculum needs to be regularly evaluated to ensure that these skills are imparted to young learners for their individual benefit and for the benefit of society.
Journal Article
Football and Post-War Reintegration: exploring the role of sport in DDR processes in Sierra Leone
Growing enthusiasm for 'Sport for development and peace' (sdp) projects around the world has created a much greater interest among critical scholars seeking to interrogate potential gains, extant limitations and challenges of using sport to advance 'development' and 'peace' in Africa. Despite this interest, the role of sport in post-conflict peace building remains poorly understood. Since peace building, as a field of study, lends itself to practical approaches that seek to address underlying sources of violent conflict, it is surprising that it has neglected to take an interest in sport, especially its grassroots models. In Africa, football (soccer) in particular has a strong appeal because of its popularity and ability to mobilise individuals and communities. Through a case study on Sierra Leone, this paper focuses on sports in a particularly prominent post-civil war UN intervention-the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (ddr) process-to determine how ex-youth combatants, camp administrators and caregivers perceive the role and significance of sporting activities in interim care centres (iccs) or ddr camps. It argues that sporting experiences in ddr processes are fruitful microcosms for understanding nuanced forms of violence and healing among youth combatants during their reintegration process.
Journal Article