Childhoods in Ghana : understanding the work of NGOs as cultural brokers and translators in childhood construction

Abstract

Child protection is an important issue in Ghana. The country was the first in the world to ratify the United Nations Conventions of the Right of the Child (UNCRC). There is also a whole government ministry dedicated to child protection. As such, a vast amount of energy and funding are devoted to generating the right policy, models, and interventions, which are in line with international standards or global text such as the UNCRC to protect children. However, little attention is given to the relationship between these models and policy, and the actual practices the implementations are expected to legitimise. Using an actor-oriented approach, this study follows the network of a child-focus NGO during the implementation of an intervention to prevent child labour and encourage schooling in a rural cocoa growing area of Ghana. The study uses ethnographic method to get into the lifeworld of NGO field officers tasked to implement the intervention and reveals that practices on the field are uniquely different from the intervention prescriptions. NGO officials, however, spend the best part of their energies on maintaining coherent presentation of their efforts as a consequence of prescribed policies and models and to achieve measurable success, to meet expectations of higher administrators, safeguard their jobs and to ensure funding. The study concludes that in doing so, NGO officials as victims of the wider development narrative, block the opportunity to learn from the real challenges that make childhood intervention successful beyond measurable and visible achievements.