Research Update: January 2006

I am now in the second year of my PhD research in Zambia on the issue of Child-Headed Households (CHH) which is a collaborative piece of research bringing Street Child Africa and the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway (University of London), together. During my first year (2004-2005), I returned to Zambia to follow up on the pilot study research which was conducted in April 2004 and begin the first of two much longer phases of qualitative, participatory fieldwork with CHH. Over the course of 6 months in Zambia, and working alongside 5 NGOs, 4 research assistants and numerous community leaders and officials, information on CHH was gathered from four research sites (urban, semi-urban and rural) with 100 households. A group of 12 core CHH formed the focus for more in-depth ethnographic case study work using a toolkit of informal, qualitative and participatory techniques and revealing much about the day-to-day existence of CHH. To give an idea of the kinds of households which are the focus of this research, I have included an extract from one of the case studies below:

“Rose is 13 years old and lives in a shanty compound in Lusaka. She is the head of her household which includes her two younger siblings – Felicity, 9 and Mulenga, 7, and also occasionally, her alcoholic grandfather. She wakes up at 6 am, fetches water from the tap and returns to bath her young ones. When she has money for school fees, she sends her sister to school, then walks, with her young brother, into town: a journey that takes them about 40 minutes – a long way to walk especially for a 13 and a 7 yr old. Once in town, Rose heads straight to the market where she jostles with other customers for fish, which she takes back home. She then spends the afternoon drying the fish in the sunshine and catching up on household chores: washing clothes, cooking and sweeping. When I asked Rose about the household chores that she does, she says the washing is the easiest because they only have one set of clothes each so there is never much to do. In the evening she prepares the one meal she and siblings eat each day. When darkness falls, she puts the young ones to bed and goes out onto the street and into taverns and bars where she sells fish to the customers, usually until about 10 or 11 pm. When asked what her biggest fear is, Rose says she worries about the safety of her young ones when she is out selling at night as the shanty is a dangerous place. Rose is a street child. She spends most of her time on the street to make money. She has a roof over her head now but the place is rented and she can’t afford to pay now that her parents are dead. She is four months behind on payments and it won’t be long before she is kicked out and will be also sleeping on the streets with her young brother and sister in tow.”

The next stage of the doctoral research:

I will be returning to Zambia this academic year for a further 6 month phase of fieldwork which will involve tracing CHH from the last visit and doing more in-depth work with them. The research design will continue to be child-centred and focussed, with the specific methodology being developed in consultation with core CHH, gatekeeper organisations and community stakeholders. It will aim to address new themes and questions arsing from analysis of the data collected to date; assess and explore the changes experienced by CHH over the last year; investigate, more deeply, issues highlighted by CHH as having particular significance in their lives; and examine, more explicitly, appropriate forms of assistance through an on-going dialogue with all stakeholders.

NB: All names and specific site location details in this story have been changed to protect the identities of the children involved.