Correlación

Accepted [forthcoming] in: Childhood.

Tatek Abebe¹ and Anne Trine Kjørholt

Deaprtment of Geography/Norwegian Centre for Child Research NTNU, N-7491 Trondheim, Norway

E-mail:- [email protected] Tel: +4773596247 (Office)

Abstract

This article explores the role of children in household livelihoods among the Gedeo ethnic community in Ethiopia. We discuss three themes – reproductive activities, entrepreneurial work in market places and socio-spatial mobility – in the context of recent theoretical debates over children’s social competency. With shifts in rural livelihoods, children have developed new agentic and entrepreneurial skills in domestic work, trade and migration. This agency is negotiated in everyday life, but it is also structurally highly circumscribed. Situating children’s work within post-rural economic development offers insight into the ways in which regional and global political economy shape their local livelihoods.

Key words: children’s work, socio-spatial mobility, rural livelihoods, development, Ethiopia

1 First author

my brothers and four of my sisters. Every day, after I return from school, I go to the daily market, where we own a regular pitch, to sell salt, beans, kerosene and enset. In the late afternoon, I keep an eye on my siblings or go along with my friends in the village to the collective tap to fetch water, and assist my mother in the kitchen when she prepares dinner. I also make and serve coffee to my parents, and to the neighbors, who usually come by. With the little time I have left in the evening, I try to do my school homework for the next day.

But if I am tired I simply sleep, and go to school early in the morning to finish my assignment before classes begin.

This quote from a story written by Alemnesh gives us a brief insight into a typical day for a rural girl in Gedeo, Ethiopia, and beyond. It demonstrates how she juggles her responsibilities at home with school work and how she uses her time creatively. It also provides us with an important anecdote about the significance of work as a crucial dimension of children’s lives in rural agricultural contexts. Alemnesh’s life is different from, and lacks the essential ingredients of, the normative and urban, middle-class childhood: full-time schooling, being inside the home, being dependent on adults for provision, and becoming vulnerable to environmental and social risks by being ‘out of designated children’s spaces’. By working in a family business in the market, looking after her siblings and supporting her parents, Alemnesh fulfils the socially meaningful and valuable role of being a child growing up in traditional, local community setting.

The role of children in economic and social reproduction in the global South has not been adequately explained. Much of the research seems to focus on the difficulty work presents to schooling or to attaining universal child rights. Although the work undertaken by children in the course of everyday life are not ‘damaging’ to their physical, intellectual and social development, they are increasingly becoming an integral part of, and are being transformed by, complex socio-cultural and political-economic processes. Previous texts on the relationship between ‘development’ and children’s livelihoods is limited but growing (see Bass, 2004;

Katz, 2004; Ansell, 2005). Key literature on how children’s work is embedded in the material and social conditions of society, unequal relations of power and discourses that are shaping national and international legislation regarding child labor have also emerged (Nieuwenhuys, 1996; Ennew et al., 2005; Bourdillion, 2004, 2006). These studies indicate, among other things, that material transformations associated with development not only alter children’s

directly and indirectly.

In Africa, calls to study children as both actors in and victims of socio-economic changes have recently been made (Kesby et al., 2006: 199). Although the economic role of children in household survival strategies has long been recognized, the social meanings of their work and its geographical context have been researched less. There is also a general paucity of studies on the experiences of rural children, who are believed to have either been ‘cut off’ from external influence or are not being affected by the capitalist system. However, families and their children in remote villages are facing the brunt of unfettered globalization, prompted by the rapid penetration of capital, in multiple ways (Porter, 1996; Katz, 2004). In a cash-crop agricultural context, the literature is replete with how export-oriented commercial farming has intensified child labor, social inequalities and economic differentiation, as well as how it has led to the entrenchment of new forms of patriarchy in which economic control of household assets by men is producing an increased subordination of women (Grier, 1994; Lange, 2000).

Cash-crop agriculture is also seen as having disrupted complementary gender relations between men and women in southern Ethiopia (Hamer and Hamer, 1994), disempowering the latter by taking land away from the production of a local staple – enset – commonly known as the ‘women’s crop’. In Gedeo, where subsistence agriculture formerly met basic household needs, the ways in which transformations in the livelihood trajectories of rural communities prompted by the restructuring of the global market for export-oriented crops, mainly coffee, is having an enduring impact in reshaping local reproduction patterns has been documented by the first-named author (Abebe, 2007).

This article explores the livelihoods of children and young people among the Gedeo ethnic community in southern Ethiopia. We aim to: a) track the shift in the livelihoods of peasant households from subsistence agriculture to cash-crop production; b) explore the impact of this on children’s livelihoods; and c) examine their agency and social competence using their own perspectives of work and contributions in daily and generational reproduction. We document a wide range of paid and unpaid economic activities in which they take part, as well as issues of their socio-spatial mobility, trading activities, caring work and domestic responsibilities. In so doing, we elaborate children’s participation in diverse livelihoods and place ongoing debates in childhood studies over agency and social competence within the context of

post-following the sections on the conceptual frameworks and methodology, to which we now turn.