Children, Mobility and Transport in Sub-Saharan Africa

Children, Transport and Mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa:

This project focuses on:

• the mobility constraints faced by girl and boy children in accessing health, educational and other facilities in sub-Saharan Africa,
  
• the lack of direct information on how these constraints impact on children's current and future livelihood opportunities,
  
• and the lack of guidelines on how to tackle them. 
  

The aim is to provide a child-centred evidence base strong enough to substantially improve policy in the three focus countries - Ghana, Malawi and South Africa - and to change thinking across Africa.  

The project will test an innovative two-strand child-centred methodology, involving both adult and child researchers.  In addition to a more conventional interview study with children, parents, teachers and community leaders (conducted by adult academic researchers), there will be a complementary component of truly child-centred research conducted by child researchers (facilitated by adults).  This takes forward an earlier pilot of the child-centred approach that was carried out in Ghana and South Africa. 

The aim is to apply the successful child researcher pilot, while ensuring achievement of a substantial and comparable quantitative and qualitative dataset across the three countries, from which policy guidelines can be established.

Inception Workshop
The programme’s inception workshop was held in Blantyre, Malawi (25^th Sept - 1^st Oct 2006, enabling key country researchers to meet and to review their research plans with each other and with the UK team and Professor Michael Bourdillon (advising the project on the research component with children).

This workshop comprised a mix of joint meetings with all researchers and a second two strand component when teachers and child researchers undertook activities separately from the adult researchers. Teachers acted as chaperones and provided translation where neccessary. 

Children’s Training Workshop
The inception workshop was followed by the first Children’s research training workshop (2^nd – 5^th October 2006). Led by Professor Michael Bourdillon, it was attended by 12 children from 3 different schools in the Blantyre district:
- Zingwangwa (urban)
- Ndirande (peri-urban)
- Mpemba (rural)

Reports of both workshops are available on request.

This research programme was initiated by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Durham UK) in collaboration with IFRTD, the University of the Cape Coast (Ghana), CSIR Transportek (South Africa), and the University of Malawi.

The research is funded by the Economic and Social ESRC and the UK Department for International Development (DFID)

For more information including background resources please check the project website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/child.mobility/  
or email Dr Gina Porter: r.e.porter@dur.ac.uk