Children and Young People in Africa

Author(s):  
Kristen Cheney

Research on children and youth in Africa has played a formative role in the advancement of theories in child development, international development, and youth studies. Before the establishment of childhood studies as a distinct area of research in its own right, many Africa-focused texts—if they mentioned children at all—placed them in a corollary role to that of adults; child well-being was taken as a barometer of parenting or the state of a country’s development progress. With the advent of more child-centered research, much of the more recent literature developed on children, youth, and childhood in Africa centers on children as objects of—and sometimes respondents to or participants in—national/international development. Perhaps because Africa’s development indicators are comparatively low, scholarly work on children tends to take a development- or rights-centered approach. Popular topics focus on the hardships young Africans face: how poverty drives children into laboring, soldiering, or otherwise hazardous activity or how children suffer disproportionately from economic and political insecurity. The influence of HIV/AIDS is also ubiquitous. Because of its profound effect on every aspect of life, HIV/AIDS cross-cuts many sections in this bibliography. The literature on young people in Africa also considers the vast potential of this demographic majority of the population (nearly half of the continent’s population is under fifteen years old). Most research now focuses on child/youth agency in the face of social, economic, and political challenges, seeing young people as a resource for development—sometimes by drawing on and reframing African cultural traditions.

Author(s):  
Rosie Parnell ◽  
Maria Patsarika

Defining the scope of children, young people, and architecture as a field is an interesting challenge, since architecture draws on the theories and knowledge of a wide range of disciplines to inform its own understandings. Scale also comes into question: architecture can be understood to be strategic as well as haptic; sociocultural and political as well as experiential and material. This article focuses primarily on architecture as design and social process, with a spatial product. Work in this field, as delimited, can be grouped into five areas: children’s spaces as product, the impact of built environment on children, design participation process, appropriation of space, and children’s architectural education. However, architecture as a discipline has not yet created a substantial scholarly body of work on any topic within this field, except perhaps for school design. Work related to children, young people, and architecture exists within Oxford Bibliographies at the scale of the city, neighborhood, and landscape—including school grounds (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles in Childhood Studies “Children and the Environment”; “Children’s Geographies”; “Geographies of Children and Childhood”; and “The Spaces of Childhood”. A selection of work addressing the city scale is included here as a context essential to the critical development and understanding of the spatial designer and architectural researcher. The work of historians—primarily centering on schools—is followed by sources that provide An Overview of Children’s Spaces, before moving on to specific Typologies of Space (see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Childhood Studies “Children’s Museums”. The Participation in the Design Process section broadly considers spatial design process with children, where researcher-practitioners from a range of disciplines have made significant contributions. The Impact of the Built Environment on children as occupiers, or “users,” is considered in two separate realms: Health and Well-Being and Academic Performance and Student Behavior. Since the process of creating architecture is here understood to continue beyond design, into inhabitation, children’s creation of space through Appropriation of Space is given separate attention. Finally, the growing subfield of Children’s Architecture Education—or, more broadly, built environment education—is scoped through the few scholarly articles and book chapters that have emerged in recent years. In summary, this is a young field, as reflected in the lack of textbooks, anthologies, and journals dedicated specifically to children, young people, and architecture. There is great potential for architecture, including its design- and practice-based research methods, to make further contributions to understandings of childhood and its relationship to space.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Koimett

The main aim of this paper is to examine the importance, implications, and opportunities of the school library in providing information and ideas that are fundamental to functioning successfully in today’s information and knowledge-based society. The school library equips students with life-long learning skills and develops their imagination, enabling them to live as responsible citizens. This paper will explore how school libraries enable all members of the school community to become critical thinkers and effective users of information in all formats and media. Further, it will stress the need to link school libraries to the wider library and information network in accordance with the principles in the UNESCO Public Library Manifesto. More specifically, this paper will examine the link between life skills and the school libraries in building cognitive, personal, and interpersonal skills in the background of a developing country like Kenya. It will endeavour to corroborate Douglas (2000) statement that ‘every child must become fully competent in reading so as to succeed in school and discharge responsibilities as a dependable citizen of a democratic society’. Students in every field must read in order to keep abreast of what is happening around them. What better way can there be than having well equipped school libraries that are effortlessly accessible? This paper is based on the premise that life skills which represent the psycho-social skills that determine valued behaviour and include for example reflective skills such as problem-solving and critical thinking, personal skills such as self-awareness, and interpersonal skills can be developed through exposure to a variety of media. Reference will be made to a range of research which suggest that practicing life skills leads to qualities such as self-esteem, critical thinking, decision making, sociability and tolerance among others. For purposes of this paper, it is worth noting that UNICEF defines life skills as “a behaviour change or behaviour development approach designed to address a balance of three areas: knowledge, attitude and skills”. In Kenya today, the citizens are grappling with a myriad of problems including illiteracy, poverty, HIV/AIDS, displacement, hunger, high inflation levels, domestic violence, and terrorism. This paper will investigate how the school library can, by and large, be used to stem the challenges, and be employed to develop and grow the nation. Indeed, if young people are empowered with life skills, they will be able to make the right choices through situational analysis, critical thinking and informed decision making. Consequently, they avoid risky behaviour, reduce their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS and other vices since life skills are essentially those abilities that help promote mental well-being and competence in young people as they face the realities of life. 


Author(s):  
V. V. Titov

This study is devoted to the topic of changes in the national-state identity of Russians under the influence of the transformation of value orientations and the social well-being of young people The work methodology is built through a comparative analysis with secondary processing of this sociological research by the POF and RPORC The hypothesis put forward by the author is based on the assumption that the key factor in changing the value and behavioural attitudes of Russian youth is not the perception of the globalising culture but the quality of social well-being of the younger generation According to the data of sociological studies, the latter is primarily characterised by the presence of depressive elements that form unfavourable conditions for the development of in-group favouritism and out-group discrimination As the data of mass polls show, the image of the collective past is built mainly on the idealisation of the Soviet period, the legacy of which is largely denied by the Russian elites (since this is required to legitimise the existing political and economic model) A positive image of the future in the mass consciousness is either absent or, presumably, replaced by ideas about borrowing the Western European model or reconstructing the Soviet system The image of a signifcant other in the face of the West, despite the presence of confrontation between it and Russia, is seen as a more positive model from the point of view of ensuring social justice.


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