Today is the Day of the African Child. A time to celebrate the energy, strength and creativity of children across Africa. And a time to reflect, take stock and renew our commitment to giving African children a chance of a future they deserve.
The theme for this year’s Day of the African Child is Eliminating Harmful Practices Affecting Children: Progress on policy and practice since 2013. More on that later.
First up, I’d like to reflect on the context in which children develop.
A connecting theory
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which I came across during graduate studies in social protection and child poverty, considers child development as a complex system of relationships. These are affected by multiple levels of adjacent and surrounding environments, from the immediate family and school to broader customs, cultural values and laws.
Studying a child’s development therefore entails looking not only at the child and his or her immediate surroundings, but also at the interplay of the larger human ecosystem. In other words, the sociocultural aspects of a child’s overall wellbeing that go beyond individual, household, community and societal relationships.
Bronfenbrenner suggests that a child’s environment is a nested rganization of structures – the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and the chronosystem. These are arranged so that each structure has an impact on the child.
This raises two points that strike a chord with the theme of this year’s International Day of the African Child about eliminating harmful practices.
First, an emphasis on children’s vulnerability and on their protection as part of childhood development reflects the wider environment children live in.
Second, a social construction of childhood should recognise the need to deal with the barriers children face in their development.
Both points suggest that harmful practices against African children – even when such practices are subtly and culturally acceptable and permissible – are a blight to child development.
What are harmful practices?
A 2016 UN publication on Violence Against Children – with emphasis on Africa – found that millions of children are subjected to different forms of harmful practices. In many sub-Saharan countries these include early and forced marriage, female genital mutilation, bonded labor, accusations of witchcraft, and son preferences.
The report notes that such practices have religious, social and/or cultural underpinning. The common denominator is their devastating effects on children’s self-esteem, education, health, development and protection.
Let me digress.
In junior secondary school, I had a classmate and a friend from one of the northcentral states in Nigeria. A lovely and intelligent fellow. He had a facial scare, three marks on each side of his cheek, that we commonly refer to in these parts as tribal marks.
Seen as a mark of identity, deep cuts were carved by some families on the foreheads and/or cheeks of children. A BBC Africa feature on the subject of facial marks states that the marks “held stories of pain, reincarnation and beauty.”
While the marks may have been popular and held in awe and beauty, they could also cause pain and damage children’s confidence. As was the case of my friend. .
He had to bear not only the pain when the marks were inflicted in childhood but also, in his teenage years, the torrent of ridicule that came with the scars. Some classmates referred to him as Sergeant, alluding to the insignia of a sergeant’s rank.
Facial marks are less common in Nigeria today. In 2003, a national law banned all forms of child mutilation. However, the practice still holds sway.
Another harmful practice, child marriage, has been described by Save the Children as “the devastating end of childhood”. A common practice in many West and Central African countries including Nigeria, child marriage is entrenched in traditional, religious, legal and even economic conditions that discriminate against girls and women.
The practice contravenes Nigeria’s constitution, the Child Rights Act and international charters and conventions. All these instruments guarantee children’s right to freedom from coercion and violence, and the right to health and education. However, religious legal systems and cultural inclinations in the some parts of Nigeria fail to take adequate steps to ban or curtail the practice.
A Kairos moment
Kairos, from ancient Greek, means “the right, opportune or critical moment”. It signifies a time when conditions are ripe for action. The theme of the Day of the African Child 2022 makes the connection between policy and practice in accelerating progress in eliminating harmful practices.
A first step is adopting and properly implementing national and sub-national legislation. This expresses a society’s accountability for realising children’s rights. As in Bronfenbrenner’s human ecosystem, the wider society needs to own and agree to the laws that prohibit harmful practices and protect the child.
Governments should establish or strengthen appropriate reporting systems for harmful practices. This includes incorporating standards of reporting in codes of conduct for institutions that work with and for children. Compulsory reporting responsibilities must recognise the confidentially of people who report.
Another practical step is the strategic engagement of community and religious leaders. It is vital to collaborate closely with this group, building on their influence in promoting awareness among communities and families of the negative impact of harmful practices on the child.
In the immediate circle of parents and extended family members, communities should be active in discussing children’s rights, the need to protect children from violence, and the impact harmful practices have on their development. This should dovetail with considering what opportunities there are to encourage these practices to be abandoned.
Finally, children should feel empowered to push for prevention and rejection of these practices. Education plays an important role here in overcoming discrimination and negative belief systems. Children can be supported to engage in child rights advocacy and policy implementation that aim to prevent and abandon harmful practices.
Photo: Schoolfriends in in Cross River State, Nigeria (Tom Maguire/Save the Children)
