Rethinking child migration dynamics in Eastern Africa: ethnographic insights from Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania

Abstract (English)

Various civil society organisations working in the field of child migration in East Africa tend to identify and select the “beneficiary” children of their projects on the basis of specific categories and attributes often defined by donors, international organizations, NGOs etc. These include definitions such as “vulnerable”, “unaccompanied” or “unsupervised”, “lonely” and “homeless” children. Government guidelines developed in different countries for child protection and care outline the ways in which children should be protected, effectively guiding the operational choices of organisations. Examples are national strategies for the reintegration of children on the move promoting a model based on family reintegration. The main objective is to return children to their families of origin, or to adopt alternative solutions that avoid institutionalisation, including adoption, fostering within extended families, and placement in local communities. This sort of “de-institutionalisation” approaches recur similarly in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya.
In an attempt to adhere to official categorisations of vulnerable children and to conform to national guidelines, many organisations working in the field of child migration tend to include only some specific types of children in their projects. For example, so-called “children on the street” with a migration background are included, while other less visible forms of child migration are often excluded. This is the case, among others, of girls and adolescents who migrate accompanied by a guarantor or a supposed “relative” and are subsequently placed in domestic work, apparently under the guardianship of a host family.
This presentation stems from an ethnographic research work carried out in three East African countries: Ethiopia (Dire Dawa/Harar), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam) and Kenya (Nairobi). The aim is to show that simplification of categories used for policy making may carry a gender bias. The paper highlights different forms of internal migration involving children and adolescents, which goes beyond the migration categories and trajectories on which the stakeholders initially expected the research to focus.