Ugandan grassroots influencers are addressing inequities in sexual and reproductive health

Where state capacity is limited, grassroots influencers at the community level can play a vital role in improving sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Drawing on diary entries kept by influencers and health project managers in two sites in Uganda, new research explores the emancipatory potential of such community practices, and the implications for institutionalising these actors on health objectives

How do grassroots networks in Kenya tackle violence against children?

In the absence of state infrastructure, grassroots networks play a crucial role in addressing the prevalence of violence against children in Kenya. How do these networks work and how can they be supported to overcome their challenges

The voices of children and youth in Tanzania’s covid-19 response

Rapid research into the effects of COVID-19 on young people in Tanzania reveals high levels of anxiety about the virus as it relates to relationships, economic livelihoods and the community. The research, led by Dr Elizabeth Ngutuku, draws further attention to the need for governments to consider the disease’s wider social and psychological impacts

Grassroots actors do vital work to prevent violence against children despite lacking resources

Grassroots actors in Kenya must navigate the challenges of working with state and non-state actors to help keep children safe. Eliza Ngutuku and Jacqueline Mutua look at how they exert agency despite a lack of funding and official power

Rhizomatic Cartographies of Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Siaya, Kenya

Rhizomatic Cartographies of Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability is an interdisciplinary research on children’s complex lived experience in Kenya. It is based on a one-year ethnographic research in Siaya, a county characterized by some of the lowest indicators of child wellbeing in Kenya. The research was guided by the key cartographical question, how is it both to be, and to be constructed as, a poor and vulnerable child in Siaya, Kenya? I took the rhizome, a Deleuzean imaginary for complexity, fluidity and interconnectedness as the conceptual, methodological, and organizing principle for my study. I explored the children’s experience as ‘cartography’, or a rhizomatic map from three interlinked every-day and symbolic spaces of children. These are: the household/home, and non-state and state programmes of support and schooling. Based on four main observations I demonstrate that contradictions suffuse the lived experience of children. First, due to poverty and associated vulnerabilities, children encounter challenges in enjoying their rights as citizens. Second, in the different spaces, children are targets of diverse interpretations and constructions of their identity and needs and these constructions influence their experience. Third, children and their caregivers draw on concrete, cultural and discursive strategies to cope with these constraints and constructions of their identity, rights and needs. They lay claims to their citizenship rights, but also perceive these rights as due from the state and a range of others. Finally, these strategies and sensibilities – themselves rhizomatic, in turn influence or become part of the cartographies of children’s lived experience of poverty and vulnerability. My research therefore reveals that children’s lived experience is not linear. It is formed at sometimes enduring and/or shifting interstices of material lack and historically/politically located factors. It also forms at complex social relations, including community-individual and state-citizen relations and obligations. This experience coalesces at the context of representations and understanding of children’s needs, rights and identity in programmes and the emergent agency of children. These cartographical readings of children’s experience were enabled by my theoretical intervention of ‘listening softly to children’s voice’. ‘Listening softly’ is a perspective that not only democratizes relations by giving children a voice but acknowledges children as knowing subjects. ‘Listening softly’ goes further to capture and draw implications for various dimensions of children’s voice. Listening softly was enabled by my methodological orientation of a rhizome, and I therefore located children’s voice as emergent in diverse contexts including locations of power. I also acknowledged that voice is multi-vocal and includes silence, the silenced and the unsaid. ‘Listening softly’ was supported by my diffractive reading of perspectives obtained through child-centred methods including narrative conversations, ph

Sexual and Reproductive Health Information and Services for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Youth in Kenya

Various studies have indicated the disparities that exist between Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth in relation to adequate and accurate sexual and reproductive health knowledge. Even when efforts are geared towards improving sexual and reproductive health services and information processes for Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth, minimal adaption to the versatile virtual, social cultural, economic spaces in which these youth are embedded has compounded these disparities. This paper provides a perspective on these spaces from a perspective of the space they open and spaces that may close in such sites. We explore the various actual and symbolic services and information sites identified by Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth, how information is passed (pathways) in these sites, the barriers, tensions, attitudes of different providers at each site, as well as perceptions of effectiveness as well as normative and practical barriers. It is important to note that the problems Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth face are not just local, but should be seen from the context of both local level, contextual and macro level factors. In this paper therefore we also explore state policy and practice as an important site pertaining to people with disabilities but Deaf and Hard of Hearing youth in particular