Early Childhood Care and Education at the Margins

African Perspectives on Birth to Three

Hasina Ebrahim, Auma Okwany, Oumar Barry, Hasina Banu Ebrahim, Auma Okwany, Oumar Barry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351185134
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation de la petite enfance

The importance of early childhood care and education (ECCE) in the lives of very young children is gaining increasing attention around the globe and yet there is a persistent lack of diverse knowledge perspectives on this critical phase. This stems from dominant Eurocentric framings of early childhood research, and related theories. Early Childhood Care and Education at the Margins provides contextual accounts of ECCE in Africa in order to build multiple perspectives and to promote responsive thought and actions.

The book is an entry point to knowledge production for birth to three in Africa and responds to the call for the field to be in dialogue with different perspectives that attempt to map concepts, debates and contemporary concerns. In this book, a group of African authors, representing both Anglophone and Francophone Africa, provide insider's perspectives on a wide range of geographic, cultural and thematic positions. In so doing, they show the breadth and depth of ideas on which the ECCE field draws. The chapters in the volume highlight a range of topics including poverty, early socialisation, local care practices, gendered roles, and service provision. They open up important points of departure for thinking about ECCE policy, practice, theory and research.

The book presents African perspectives in a globalising world. It is therefore suitable for an international readership. It includes cross-cultural comparisons as well as critiques of dominant discourses which will be of particular interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students active in the field of ECCE, childhood studies, cultural studies and comparative education.

Chapter 1

Creating visibility for birth to 3 in Africa

A push from the margins

Auma Okwany and Hasina Banu Ebrahim

Introduction

The Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) phase spans a range of activities that promote holistic care and education for children from birth to 8 years. It is considered the initial crucial step to laying a sound foundation for addressing intersecting social, emotional, cognitive and physical development for young children. Despite this critical role in establishing a solid and broad foundation for lifelong learning and for influencing wellbeing throughout the life course, ECCE has received marginal attention in policy, practice and in research. This marginality is exacerbated for the birth to 3 phase in the majority world in general and in Africa specifically. This book aims to create visibility of this foundational phase in Africa through a focus on 3 specific issues, namely, the need to focus on the birth to 3 phase; the sensitising concepts that enable a push from the margins with empirical examples from the chapters in this book; and the weak research capacity in Africa on indigenous knowledge and some affirming initiatives to enhance capacity.

ECCE has gained increasing national and global attention and impetus in the last two decades. There have also been remarkable gains made in policy and practice in the care and education of young children in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. However, we have argued elsewhere (Okwany & Ebrahim 2016) that these programmes and policies are based on the dominant narrative, which is the product of Euro-American culture and storyline, and its claims to universality that promote models of childhood, motherhood, family, care and education and decontextualised “best practices”. This in turn influences the way in which child development is read, interpreted, practiced and researched. This is particularly acute in Africa, where colonial and neoliberal forces have long suppressed local and indigenous voices. The homogenising and standardising tendencies of the dominant paradigm masks and even erodes a focus on the diversity of situated epistemologies and embedded voices of communities and scholars in diverse contexts in Africa.

We thus challenge the predominance of received knowledge in ECCE by making visible the role of power in the generation of knowledge in diverse contexts. We argue that the valuing of grand narratives at the expense of local knowledge leads to constructions of truth, which often fail to consider distinct settings and situated complexities of childhood and care at the margins. In foregrounding the above, we add our voice to the growing constituency of scholars who are securing representation for majority world scholars to be seen as speaking subjects in ECCE knowledge production and who have argued for child development practice that is contextual and situated (Ebrahim 2012; Marfo et al. 2008; Nsamenang 2008; Nsamenang & Tchombe 2011; Odora Hoppers 2010; Okwany et al. 2011; Serpell & Nsamenang 2015; Pence 2013; Penn 2012, 2017; Shiva 2000; Smith 1999).

Our critique of the dominant ECCE models goes beyond a polemic response to an approach that is cautious and calls for working within and against the dominant framing of childhood and ECCE. This cautious critique requires, as we have noted elsewhere, that we “avoid a reactive Africentrism, but rather be attentive to the in between spaces and perspectives in early childhood care and education” (Okwany & Ebrahim 2016:445). This is useful in bridging the polarity of the dominant and Africentric narratives and demonstrates how they can draw from each other with the dominant being informed by contextual realities. Such a perspective has implications for policy, theory, research and practice in that it calls for a critique that does not border on closure and war between dominant and subjugated models of ECCE. We show how the marginalisation of local narratives constitutes epistemic injustice and has implications for context specific approaches and research in ECCE. Hence, pushing from the margins, as noted in the title of this chapter, is both a political and ethical imperative.

In this introductory chapter, we set the scene and make a case for illuminating peripheral issues for birth to 3 in Africa. We show realities that urge action from ECCE researchers, policy makers and practitioners. This thrust, together with other issues raised for a reality check in ECCE, is dedicated to making the margins matter. We believe that the approach we have taken is promising and invites debate, critical thought and expanded understandings for action in ECCE. Indeed, this chapter and the studies included in the book represent an effort to demonstrate that through the complex task of pushing from the margins, new agendas for shaping the landscape of ECCE in Africa can be advanced through creating visibility to ECCE generally and birth to 3 specifically.

The need to focus on birth to 3 in Africa

There are several factors contributing towards the need for a focus on birth to 3 in Africa. These factors relate to research evidence, policy and practice. There is mounting research evidence that show the importance and benefits of ECCE in the lives and wellbeing of young children including the critical birth to 3 phase. Despite the evidence, there remain significant challenges, which constrain equitable and inclusive provisioning of ECCE. Holistic child development is critically important in the African continent, which has the highest number of children worldwide as well as the highest number of young children (Ensor 2012). The lack of universal social protection and limitations in access to and quality of social services in contexts of generalised insecurity means that most young children are exposed to multiple and intersecting risks and vulnerabilities. These are related to health, welfare, housing, family support, employment and education that affects growth and development, and according to ACPF (2016) is evidenced in poor child wellbeing indicators. As the authors in this volume show, this is accentuated for children and caregivers in diverse physical and socially marginal places and spaces like refugee camps, rural or urban poor contexts. This also includes non-normative caregivers such as teenage mothers, children heading households and fathers who are often marginalised by social and gendered norms.

The imperative of an integrated approach to address the interwoven and mutually reinforcing care and education needs of young children is well documented (Lee et al. 2015; Kaga et al. 2010; Vargas-Barón 2015). Care includes health, nutrition and hygiene in a warm, secure and nurturing environment and education, which encompasses stimulation, socialisation, participation, learning and developmental activities. Despite the interconnectedness of these dimensions of early development, the current framing of ECCE policy and programmes has continually adopted a segmented approach. As noted by Moss (2013), ECCE is structured as a split system with the childcare services targeting those under 3 and early education for those over 3 aimed at “readying” them for formal schooling.

However, the school readiness discourse marginalises holistic ECCE because interventions targeting preschoolers are often de facto early education programmes disproportionately focused on cognitive development via didactic learning methods and narrow skills necessary for early schooling success (Marfo 2011; Moss 2013; Okwany et al. 2011; Penn 2012). Additionally, the levying of school fees restricts access for poor households raising equity concerns. The lack of creative stimulation, socialisation and play in most of these programmes in many contexts in Africa promotes what researchers have termed as “schoolification” of early education (Choi 2006; Moss 2012, 2013; OECD 2001, 2006). As noted by Whitebread and Bingham (2011:1) the focus on a specific notion of “readiness”, as a normative developmental goal and the acquisition of particular knowledge and skills, leads to children being measured against a “deficit model” and a set of inappropriate, one-size-fits-all standards of “readiness for school”.

We add our voice to arguments for a shift away from constricted notions of learning to more expansive conceptions consistent with holistic ECCE. These encompass a range of developmental milestones and stimulation strategies to promote fine and gross physical motor competencies incorporating infant body massage as a crucial starting point, to contextual measures of intelligence which blend cognitive alacrity and social responsibility embedded in the indigenous everyday curriculum through learning by doing (Barry & Zeitlin 2011; Serpell 2011; Serpell & Nsamenang 2015). Such a focus would tackle the current fragmentary ECCE by recognising the multiplicity of foundational learning, caregiving spaces and the range of local resources to support contextualised interventions.

Another critical factor that creates a need for a focus on birth to 3 in Africa is the problematic segmentation of ECCE. This is mirrored in many contexts in sub-Saharan Africa with glaring silences and gaps in policy and practice for birth to 3, as evidenced in the fragmentary ECCE service structures (Hyde & Kabiru 2006; Marfo et al. 2008; Munene & Okwany 2016; UNESCO 2006, 2015; Vargas-Barón 2015). The care programmes are also not only marginalised and located within underfunded national welfare ministries and departments, but state limited outreach in social services means that non-state actors including private for-profit programmes are the key providers of ECCE services for many young children. There are chapters in this book that show the inequities that arise when state actors recede from ECCE and leave provisioning to the markets. Where the state has limited outreach in service provisioning in health, education, nutrition, hygiene and social protection, the focus is limited to health services for mothers and young children including prenatal care, growth monitoring, immunisation and birth registration. In addition to their restricted focus on survival, these services are also inequitable because they are not universally available or accessible. For instance in Africa, according to UNICEF (2016) young children suffer a “crisis of invisibility” because only 44% of children are registered at birth, with great regional variation ranging from 95% in South Africa to 3% in Somalia and equally stark differences in sub-regional data within countries. This is consistent with the critique by Shonkoff (2010:365) of current ECCE policies that focus more on “health survival and departmentalisation of interventions” as well as inherent weaknesses in putting these policies to effect even when they are present.

Gill (2011) notes that at least 50% of UNICEF resources is invested in child survival, thus the dominant focus of research, data and analysis is on access and utilisation of products and services. Programmatic attention and research on the social, emotional and cognitive aspects of child development, or on changes in social norms, community perceptions and participation, and other such qualitative measures, are conspicuously absent. The authors of this book respond to this gap in research by providing evidence on policy and care provisioning for birth to 3 including contextual accounts of caregiving (see next section for more details).

The sidelining of the birth to 3 phase in policy means that primary care and education is relegated to the realm of households, mainly mothers, as primary caregivers within the distributed care system of the extended family and community-based programmes (Marfo et al. 2008; Okwany et al. 2011). Indeed, households and communities make the most substantial human and financial investments in the care and development of young children in this crucial period (Marfo et al. 2008). As the authors of this book show, the marginalisation is intensified in many contexts where serious economic inequalities and social exclusion challenges predominate, thus placing a disproportionate burden on family and micro-level systems of care while ignoring their central role in providing care. This not only makes many vulnerable communities feel disengaged with policy but the reliance on dominant frameworks locate problems in the “lack” in these spaces and on caregivers’ capabilities while skirting the critical role of the state in addressing structural poverty and vulnerability.

ECCE practice is not rooted in contextual spaces where local knowledge and contemporary dynamics are a product of diverse converging or diverging practices, beliefs and interpretations of global and local forces. Limited literature from Africa sheds light on practices, which contest dominant perspectives on the care and education of children from birth to 3. Indeed, it is not uncommon in many contexts in Africa to find babies and young children immersed in daily activities where they observe and learn from siblings, peers and adults. Opportunities are thus created for the development of situated intelligences and skills in flexible settings, which might lead to agentic behaviour without planned adult support. This is in contrast to some Western practices where young children are isolated from the realities of day-to-day living. Young children are also cared for through shared caregiving and socially distributed support and early socialisation is informed by multiple caregivers. The consistency in caregiving is fragmentary but not necessarily disruptive to children as they are exposed to multiple generational perspectives and support.

The research gap on birth to 3 is also an imperative that requires a substantive focus for this phase. The authors in this book show these critical research gaps, specifically the need for more empirical evidence on the voice and embodied perspectives of young children in Africa. Children and their caregivers are speaking subjects (Okwany & Ebrahim 2016), yet the dominant narrative has often framed them as epistemic objects rather than subjects of research. Further research is needed to highlight how young children know their world as well as how adults listen to “Children’s hundred languages”, how their voices are accessed and valued in their own right and for informing policy and practice. Ebrahim (2011) challenges the accepted assumption that young children lack a voice because they cannot as yet articulate it or because they cannot articulate it the way adults are used to or expect them to. There is need to hear the voice of children albeit in different ways: focusing on verbal and non-verbal cues. This requires that those that work with very young children listen to them beyond utterances (Ebrahim 2010). Ngutuku (in this volume) makes a case for listening softly to children by focusing on what is spoken, the unspoken silences and contradictions in children’s voice. Concerted efforts need to be directed towards observing, dialoguing and interpreting what children say and also what they do not say. It is thus important for research to continue questioning the discursive fields in which young children’s voice may be embedded.

Pushing from the margins: situatedness, marginalisation, marginality and epistemic injustice

Our metatheory in this chapter is drawn from critical constructivism (Freire 1970; Kincheloe 2005; Kincheloe et al. 2011), which has also been adopted in postcolonial and feminist theories. This lens encourages the questioning and reconstruction of dominant knowledge production systems, thus opening up reflexive dialogue to include subjugated epistemologies that are situated. The notion of “situatedness” of knowledge as noted by Harraway (1988) is particularly useful because situated knowledge and voice of children and caregivers is contingent and dynamic. Harraway argues for embodied objectivity, which is negotiated from diverse action in varying contexts and meaning is constructed and reconstructed from different dimensions. This sharply contrasts with the dominant epistemology whose totalising tendency she describes as “the standpoint of the Master, the Man, the God whose Eye produces, appropriates and orders all differences” (Ibid:193). The issues addressed in this book show the stuttering of the dominant narrative, the complex nature of the ECCE and power from the margins.

Marginality broadly understood is the involuntary location at the periphery of mainstream systems that generate inequities through the distribution of benefits (Gatzweiler et al. 2011:3). Location at the margins is thus a consequence of power relationships that also defines the terms of the inclusion of those marginalised (Agamben 1998). Marginalisation and invalidation of the vast array of indigenous and contextual narratives constitute epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), which she defines as the overlooking and discrediting of certain groups as knowers and thus excluding them from knowledge production. The identity of a knower (e.g. a teenage mother, a baby) suffers from what Fricker terms as a credibility deficit, whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword to European Early Childhood Education Research Association (EECERA) Research Monographs
• 1 Creating visibility for birth to 3 in Africa: a push from the margins
• 2 Small stories from the margins: cartographies of child poverty and vulnerability experience in Kenya
• 3 Early childcare and development in Central African refugee families in Cameroon Mbere villages
• 4 Reconstructing child caregiving: perspectives on child-headed households in Uganda
• 5 Contesting and rethinking the role of men in early childhood care and education support system for birth to 3 in Zimbabwe
• 6 Repositioning peripheral voices: examining institutional processes of exclusion in health care provisioning for urban poor children from birth to 3 years
• 7 Socialisation of children aged birth to 3 in Benin: representations and routes
• 8 Early childhood care narratives of young mothers in Uganda
• 9 Bridging narratives: intergenerational transmission of indigenous knowledge in the care and education of children from birth to 3 in Madagascar
• 10 Factors influencing parental choice of centre-based provision for early childhood care and education in Ghana
• 11 Perspectives on early childhood education as a fundamental right in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
• 12 Challenges in implementing a home visiting model for early childhood development in South Africa
• 13 Paternal involvement in early childhood care and development in Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville: contextual redefinition of indicators
• Index