Towards a sustainable NGO intervention on child protection: taking indigenous knowledge seriously

Beyond educational workshops: How child‐focused NGOs can draw African rural parents out for sustainable intervention in childhoods

“…Child-focused NGOs in Ghana run on the themes of children's rights to education, the illegality of children's work, the participation of children in decision-making and a policy based on the best interest of the child principle. These principles are fundamentally different from the many childhoods experienced in many parts of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa (see Pence & Nsamenang, 2008;Twum-Danso, 2016;Yeboah & Daniel, 2020). Still, they are supported by local child-focused NGOs, international donors and organisations.…”

Solving Local Problems or Looking Good: An Ethnography of the Field Practices of Foreign Sponsored NGOs in Rural African Communities

“…However, NGO field workers' preoccupation with ensuring that their billboards were planted at easy-to-see places showed the focus of their real concerns. Farmers who participated in focus group discussions with the researcher further expressed sentiments, indicating that they would be sticking to their local knowledge of childhood construction (see Yeboah and Daniel 2020). While the calculated use of NGO branded objects was aimed at communicating doing "good", it was observed that the real efforts to stop child labour were fraught with chaos and controversies, as can be seen in the next section on the work of the stabilising groups.…”

“…The process of citizen engagement is generally identified as key in strengthening the grassroots towards sustainable social, economic and political pathways (Yeboah and Daniel 2020). However, due to a penchant for results, donor communities have narrowly emphasised on SNGOs ability to deliver quantifiable outcomes, to the detriment of effectiveness in helping civil society led transformative development (Banks et al 2015;van Zyl and Claeyé 2019).…”

“…They assumed that rural cocoa farmers allowed their children to work on cocoa plantations to increase profitability because children labour were unpaid. However, interactions with farmers showed that children's work had a cultural meaning that goes beyond profitability (see Yeboah and Daniel 2020). NGO fieldworkers also assumed farmers were interested in available rural formal education for their children and will approve of the intervention to stop child labour on the one hand and to send children to school and keep them there on the other.…”

“…Parents often regarded these cultural values as of utmost importance to their contextual reality and proper development of their children. For example, it was observed that participating parents saw children working and been useful as a sign of maturity and proper upbringing; they saw nothing illegal about it (see Yeboah and Daniel 2020). Thus, although the NGO fieldworkers had formed the stabilising groups, each group could submit to being integrated into the NGO rights-based narrative or refuse it by sticking to their indigenous knowledge on childhood development with different goals, orientations, and interests.…”