BackgroundResearchers considering children’s traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) highlighted the importance of examining children’s daily activities as empirical contexts for its acquisition. Many of them evaluated children’s TEK acquisition linearly as gain or loss, and paid less attention to the adaptive nature of this knowledge system and the social relationships arising from its acquisition processes. This study approaches children’s TEK acquisition considering these abovementioned aspects. I utilize pastoral Maasai girls’ firewood collection as a case study, and analyze the personal, interpersonal and cultural institutional aspects of girls’ Ethnobotanical knowledge (EK) acquisition within this chore.MethodsParticipant observation and unstructured interviews were used for data collection. I joined 12 girls (6 to 15 years old) on day trips for firewood collection, and documented their participation and performance during this chore. I observed interactions among girls and between girls and women concerning this activity, and investigated girls’ perceptions of local wood species via their descriptions. I also informally interviewed 15 women, between 20 and 80 years old on their evaluation of the wood species to be used as firewood.ResultsCurrent diet change and gender-age roles in chore participation in Maasai society require females to continually participate in firewood collection. Within this social context, girls intensively participated in day trips of firewood collection during the long-term vacation in the dry season. They collected a sizable amount from 24 plant species, and generated EK through personal sensual experiences, such as fragrance, hardness, and heaviness of different wood species. They acquired local taxonomy and terminology of different wood species, and learned others preferences for wood species used as fuel through interpersonal communication. These personal and interpersonal aspects, together with current diet change and division of labor within gender-age roles in Maasai society, provide EK with multi-dimensional meanings in current subsistence strategies.ConclusionsResults of this study show that girls acquired EK with multi-dimensional meanings through daily firewood collection, which cannot be only evaluated in a linear manner. Future studies focused on children’s TEK acquisition should consider the personal, interpersonal, and cultural institutional aspects of this adaptive knowledge system and children’s roles within it.

Health benefits of physical activity are well known, yet available physical activity data is limited from children living in African and Asian countries. The purpose of the cross-sectional study was to evaluate and compare physical activity and sedentary behavior patterns, particularly hourly variations, among children in Kenya and Japan. Participants included 298 primary school students (122 Kenyan, 176 Japanese) aged 9–12 years. Physical activity and sedentary behavior were measured with accelerometers. Domain-specific physical activity, screen time, and proportion of children using active transport to school were measured by questionnaire. A two-way ANOVA (countries × time) was used to examine the differences in the activity patterns between Kenyan and Japanese children. The results from the present study demonstrated that Kenyan children spent more time in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity compared to Japanese children (p < 0.05) with the greatest differences found for weekday evenings (for boys and girls) and weekend afternoons (for girls). This suggests that these were ‘critical periods’ to differentiate the physical activity levels between Kenyan and Japanese children. However, a higher proportion of the children from Japan used active transport to school and spent less time in television viewing and computer gaming. The results suggest that both countries have successes and challenges that can aid in developing effective and country-specific intervention strategies for promoting physical activity.

Objectives: Urban-rural comparisons between those who maintain traditional lifestyles such as pastoralist Maasai children, and those who live in cities such as Nairobi, provide implications on how urbanization is associated with children's physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SB) patterns. This study compares PA and SB volumes and patterns across different segments of the week among children in Maasai village and Nairobi city in Kenya.

Pastoralists in East Africa are well known for their abilities in effective livestock and natural resource management in the dynamic arid and semi-arid ecosystem in which they live. Their ethnobiological knowledge, manifest in their skills of managing livestock and natural resources, is generated from the daily experiences of individuals in different landscapes. Since the early twentieth century, the pastoralist Maasai have gradually experienced land fragmentation and lifestyle changes. However, how Maasai children learn ethnobiological knowledge and how their learning processes are related to the local accessibility of their land remain largely unknown. Focusing on eleven children's daily activities during long school vacations in a Maasai village, where lands are still communally owned, this paper aims to understand the children's ethnobiological knowledge learning and its relation to access to land in current social contexts. The children independently undertake work, such as livestock herding and food preparation, as well as engaging in various play activities. With access to the land, they continue generating ethnobiological knowledge in different spatial and temporal contexts during work and play. The results of this study illustrate that access to the land plays important roles in current Maasai societies in terms of children's ethnobiological knowledge learning. The study also suggests the necessity for further investigation of the relationship between land use changes and the ethnobiological knowledge learning of children in different small-scale societies.