Child Migration in Africa

Child Migration in Africaexplores the mobility of children without their parents within West Africa. Drawing on the experiences of children from rural Burkina Faso and Ghana, the book provides rich material on the circumstances of children's voluntary migration and their experiences of it. Their accounts challenge the normative ideals of what a 'good' childhood is, which often underlie public debates about children's migration, education and work in developing countries. The book also includes rural and urban relatives' views on young people's migration, which together with the child migrants' own descriptions of their motivations, offer a window on the decision-making processes involved. Their reasoning demonstrates that children's migration does not necessarily signify a rupture in family relations. The comparative study of Burkina Faso and Ghana highlights that social networks operate in ways that can be both enabling and constraining for young migrants, as can cultural views on age- and gender appropriate behavior. The book questions easily made assumptions regarding children's experiences when migrating independently of their parents and, by drawing parallels with children's migration in Latin America and Asia, contributes to analytical and cross-cultural understandings of childhood. This book is an important and timely contribution to an under-researched area, which has been subject to much policy-making on unsupported grounds.

Dorte Thorsen is a visiting research fellow at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex. She has done ethnographic research with children and youth migrating from the Bisa region in south-eastern Burkina Faso to Ouagadougou and Abidjan and with their rural families in some twenty villages. Raising methodological questions about the way in which children's and youth's agency can be studied beyond a narrow focus on verbal negotiations, her research theorises decision-making processes linked with young migrants' performance of identities, urban labor relations and the enactment of relatedness. She has published book chapters and policy papers based on this research, and articles in the journals Migrations & Hommes, Africa, Forum for Development Studies and the Journal for Comparative Family Studies.  Iman Hashim is a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, working on children's independent migration from rural north-eastern Ghana to rural and urban central Ghana. Her current work builds on long-term ethnographic research undertaken in a farming community in north-eastern Ghana, where she focussed on the work of children for their own households, as well as on community attitudes toward education and children's experiences of education. She also has worked for national and international non-governmental organizations as a program and a research officer.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Location, Location, Location – The Importance of Contextualising Migration
Chapter 3: Why Rural Children Become Mobile?: decisions and negotiations surrounding children's migration
Chapter 4: Journeys and Arrivals - Introductions to New Social Worlds
Chapter 5: Settling In – Being a Migrant
Chapter 6: Moving On - Spatial and Social Mobilities
Chapter 7: Conclusion - Beyond the Limits of Current Thinking on Children's Migration