Doing good requires us to get out of the way
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Exploring the dilemma of 'getting out of the way' in order to better understand Tanzanian children's experience of care.
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Doing good requires us to get out of the way
- 1. The Global Summit on Childhood - Vancouver, April 2014 "Doing good" requires us to "get out of the way" Kate McAlpine kate@katemcalpine.org
- 2. The Global Summit on Childhood - Vancouver, April 2014 Let me tell you a story When I realized what “getting out of the way” meant
- 3. The Global Summit on Childhood - Vancouver, April 2014 Dominant development discourse Positions children in Tanzania as being • Powerless victims of poverty, • Discriminated against, • Hungry, • Under-stimulated, and • Unsafe. • Many organisations aim to ‘do good’. But accept this picture with little scrutiny, and design their programs based on these assumptions about children.
- 4. Trying to get out of the way in a recent Tanzanian study • Commissioned by the Children in Crossfire. • Sought answers to the question “How do young Tanzanian children experience care?” • Aimed to truly hear children's voices. • Data collected from 96 children on the brink of entering primary school. • Participated in structured play activities & semi-structured interviews. • 95 adult care-givers participated in semi- structured interviews. • A content analysis of emerging themes.
- 5. We learnt that we should be optimistic • The majority of Tanzanian parents are dedicated, conservative and caring attachment figures for their children. • Children live in a rounded social world. • They say that they enjoy spending time at home, • They receive praise from many, • They feel safe and secure outside the confines of their parents. • Suggests that depictions of young Tanzanian children as living in a state of ‘generalised insecurity’ (Wuyts, 2008) lacks nuance and hides a more complex picture, that deserves closer analysis.
- 6. But outliers are a cause for concern • These outliers had • Little knowledge or memory of when their children began to talk, • Thought that there was no punishment that was inappropriate for a young child, • Thought it appropriate for the child to do domestic work at nine months, • Had neither hopes nor fears for their child, and • Reported that no-one gave the child play things, and that they do not play with their child.
- 7. Implications for action • Civil society actors need to consider • Shifting from the current concern with large-scale interventions towards high quality, tailor-made interventions that focus on the behavioral change of these outliers. • Building our own capacity to facilitate the inner development of people who already have few inner resources and few social safety nets.
- 8. • We should have built in time to internalize the seriousness of ethical dilemmas & to practice reflexivity. • We needed to better manage the multiple parties involved and to align expectations, perspectives and skills. • We should have gone slow so as to better listen, think deeply and to continually ask questions about our posture. • Lesson learnt: The greater the number and the more diverse the people involved, the greater the amount of time and attention needs to be paid to building a shared understanding, commitment and practice to reflexive, ethical research. How could we have got out of the way even better? The Global Summit on Childhood - Vancouver, April 2014
- 9. We can only do good by understanding how those we hope to help make meaning of their own experience. This demands that we become conscious of our own perspectives, set them aside and “get out of the way” Only then can we better hear the voices of children.
- 10. We can only do good by understanding how those we hope to help make meaning of their own experience. This demands that we become conscious of our own perspectives, set them aside and “get out of the way” Only then can we better hear the voices of children.
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- It's hot. Dust fills the sky. There are more children in the confined space than I would think possible. Almost 4,000 of them wearing tattered green sweaters and grimy white shirts over their shorts. Some are wearing shoes, some not. Some carry school bags close to their chest. Others carry old plastic containers that once held cooking oil and now hold their limited supplies of drinking water. In amongst the heaving mass of small, bright eyed and excited children are a select group of adult teachers. One teacher for every 200 children. Each holds a stick in their hand, and is exercised with the complex task of crowd control. Everyone is waiting expectantly for the "mgeni rasmi" - the special guests - who are running late and consist of the local councillor, city mayor and local philanthropist who is donating food to the students. Every time the children sense their arrival they move as a wave towards the circle of school desks where the high table is set up with a solitary microphone and lone reporter waiting with as much expectation as the students. This school has a problem - in fact it has so many problems that those of us working to improve the situation of children in this urban, unplanned neighbourhood, really don't know where to start. This is a school with literally children coming out of its ears - there are over 100 children in each class with a lone teacher who struggles to teach given the barest resources. The school does not have running water - hence the need for children to bring their own drinking water. Children habitually come to school without having eaten and then stay hungry throughout the school day. Because they are hungry many play truant, a situation exacerbated by the fact that the school's property is only partially fenced and so people come and go. Recently it has come to the school's attention that girls are being seduced by local men who come into the school and offer them food for sex, take them out of school and rape them in a nearby riverbed. The situation is complex and reveals the dark side of poor planning, resource constraints and unsupervised children. Of course we all want a quick fix. Someone who really wants a quick fix is the local councillor. In a highly politicised city, he is up against a thriving opposition, aware that his position is vulnerable and keen to demonstrate that he 'works for his people'. His solution to the myriad problems is certainly a quick fix. We are here today to celebrate the donation of flour that will be used by the school to give food to the children. None of the local officials are sure how long this donation will last, nor whether it is sustainable. The donor announces that he hopes that it will suffice for a month and that in the meantime parents will be "sensitised to feed their children". As I observe the political rally that this event is turned into - as children are incited to cry "oyeee" at every opportunity - I reflect that this is a microcosm of what goes on every day as we seek to help children. As adults we see desperation. We see the lack. What we don't see is the children's gratitude that they are even in school. We don't see the pride that they take as they write in their exercise books. Nor do we see the fun that they are having. As a practitioner I see the partiality of the intervention. I think that giving food for a month is almost meaningless because I see larger systemic problems. I see the mediocrity that pervades government's attitudes to social services. I see the political jousting and see it as time wasting. What I don't see is the children's experience as they make meaning of it. I am blinded by my age, by my professional interests, by my scholarship. I am in the way. In this presentation I am going to talk about another experience where I was part of a team researching how children experienced care in Tanzania. I will share how we tried to get out of the way, so that we could really see how children experienced childhood I will also share some surprising findings that emerged once we got out of our heads and out of children's way.
- The dominant development discourse in Tanzania tends to take a broad brush approach to children and their situation. Typically most international NGO’s or UNICEF will conduct ‘country situational analyses’ that are used to guide their programming. The intent of these are not to challenge assumptions, but essentially to conduct general audit of the status of achievement against human rights and legal instruments that the Government claims to uphold. These studies are premised on three broad assumptions: People have rights Poverty means that rights are not being upheld Thus people, and particularly children, are vulnerable In terms of depictions of childhood this results in children being framed as Passive Vulnerable Victims There is little scope within the methodology typically used – analysis of secondary data – to hear the interpretations of people doing the living and to go deep to explore the nuance of experience. The result is a claimed enthusiasm within the development world for evidence based practice, But the reality is that organizations who aim to 'do good’ may intervene without fully understanding the context without seeking out the voices and inputs of those they intend to help.
- Let me tell you about a study I was involved in, in Tanzania, where we tried to ‘get out of the way’ The intent of the study was to paint a picture of the heterogeneous practices that are used by families to care for their children across diverse tribal, lifestyle and geographical groupings. Fishermen Farmers Pastoralists Urbanites Defined childcare practices as activities performed by a responsible adult to protect, nourish, stimulate and attach with the child. The study sought out evidence about the opportunities and spaces children have to play, interactions between adults and children, the consistency of involvement from significant adults in the child’s life, the child’s sense of feeling valued within the family unit, the child’s sense of the community as a place of safety and the extent to which the child is getting both enough and the right nutrition to develop. The participants were 96 children who were about to enter primary school, so about 8 years old We wanted to ensure that the experience of vulnerable children were represented and so asked MVCC’s to nominate two children who were considered vulnerable. We eanted to sample children who are living in a variety of care situations. In Tanzania 61% of children live with two parents, 23% with single parents, 14% with grandparents and 2% in other care-giving situations such as a child headed household We used these ratios to ensure that children from each of these types of household are proportionately represented in the sample. Data collection involved A set of play activities with the children, then a semi-structured interview with children, And then the same interview with adult caregivers Interviewed both adults and children to detect the level of congruence between how children experience care and how the adults claim to offer care. We were interested to see where carers’ and children’s perceptions aligned and where there may be a disconnect. Play activities, used kinesthetic and imaginative play. Provides more qualitative and pictorial data about how children describe themselves and their care. Creates space for them to process their thoughts, and to feel safe to describe them in their own terms rather than in terms that suit adults. Built trust between child and interviewer prior to the interview A play therapist developed interactive approaches that build from the principles of creative interviewing where the data collectors "forget the rules" and allow research subjects to express themselves more freely, Two three-hour structured play sessions Warm-up games were used to help the children feel free to express themselves. Children drew their family and home, a picture of what they ate at home and a picture of who they loved. Whilst one data collector was facilitating the sessions, the other was observing the group and taking field notes, Data analysis involved A content analysis to identify emerging themes and to identify outlying behaviors that do not conform to the norm. Disaggregating data from the interviews by district. District was a proxy for the family’s lifestyle, And enabled us to explore whether contextual factors had a role to play in children’s experience of care. Looking for the congruence between adult and children’s perceptions of care Data analysis steps included Importing the interview transcripts into Nvivo and coding each transcript for responses related to the domains of 1. health, 2. water, sanitation and hygiene, 3. nutrition, 4. play & stimulation and5. protection. Generating a queries that enabled me to explore the data in more detail For each query I examined the data for frequencies, outliers and comparison between children and adult responses. A conceptual model was developed that depicted the apparent inter-relationship between structural constraints that affected how children were treated such as an absence of water facilities, clinics or play spaces Adults’ knowledge and attitudes that enabled them to better care for children, Actual care practices and finally The child’s perceived experience of attachment. Descriptive statistics were used to generate graphs of frequencies. Findings were written up.
- The results indicated that we should be optimistic about how children are cared for in Tanzania More than two thirds of adults were able to articulate the importance of talking to young children. All adults had a strong sense of the child's 'normal' state and knew that changes may indicate that the child was sick Almost all knew about the need for variety in the child’s diet, but very few framed this in the vocabulary of carbohydrate, fats, fruit and vegetable or protein. Almost all knew that abusive behaviour comes from a place of anger Most adults wanted their child to become educated, to gain employment and to live a good life They were fearful that the child would not get an education, because they were unable to cover the costs, and that without education the child would not get employment. Both adults and children frame the contribution of parents primarily in terms of seeing to the child’s needs and buying things. Only 33% of children described the relational value of their parents, 64% described how they show love to their child by giving gifts and responding to needs. Health seeking behaviors included taking the child to the clinic or hospital, often after first having tried to reduce fever, give local medicine or do first aid All adults and children claimed that they washed hands and bathed at least once a day. But many more adults reported handwashing after the toilet than children All children said that they played - football and catch, running and jumping. They draw on the ground, play with sticks, rope and stones, make and 'drive' cars and motorbikes. They pretend to cook, tell stories, sing and make up rhymes and rhythms. The mother typically provides play things and every child talked of making play things themselves. Children play with adults in games that promote teamwork, communication and gross and fine motor skills. 96% of adults said that they praised their children, and children bore this out. Mother the key person who praises Mothers predominantly took up the disciplinary role There is some dissonance between children and adults’ interpretation about the different disciplinary practices that are used. 94% of children said that they were beaten, Adults were more circumspect about admitting to this behaviour, and justified their behaviour in different more nuanced ways. They said that they warned first and then beat the child. But, the child merely remembers the beating. A picture emerges from the findings of young children being mainly surrounded by caring and engaged adults This counters some of the more negative recent research that has reviewed demographic and household surveys and portrays Tanzanian children, particularly those in the lower wealth quintiles, as being particularly vulnerable
- Whilst the general tendency is towards care of children, there are a small number of outlying adults who lack the attitudes or knowledge to be able to effectively care for young children. These are those individuals who reported that: They had little knowledge or memory of when their children began to talk, Thought that babies talked from the point of conception or soon after birth; There was no punishment that was inappropriate for a young child; It appropriate for the child to do domestic work at nine months Had neither hopes nor fears for their child; Their child did not brush their teeth; No-one gave the child play things, They do not actually play with their child.
- This study uses only a small sample group from a limited number of communities, but it does suggest that broad-brushed depictions of young Tanzanian children as living in a state of ‘generalised insecurity’ (Wuyts, 2008) lacks nuance and hides a more complex picture, that deserves closer analysis. It speaks to a shift that needs to occur in programming efforts To be directed to these outliers Programs should focus on interventions with the outlying caregivers by offering them parenting education and by supporting them to develop self-management skills. This requires a focus on depth rather than span Realize the commonalities in social need between Tanzanians and the issues facing families in the West – and thus The need to professionalize and resource the social work profession so that they can work effectively with these families Develop social protection initiatives rather than emergency responses to HIV / AIDS, which is the practice paradigm that currently underpins much work with vulnerable children.
- A disconnect between what was planned in the research design and the actual implementation. Data collectors did not understand the centrality of reflection in research They did not use the protocol that had been designed to support daily reflection. They only met daily to consider practical matters of logistics. They did not reflect deeply on their posture, on the non-verbal signals that they were getting from the participants; on potential sources of unexpressed resistance amongst the participants; nor on how they managed the power dynamic between themselves and the participants. The challenge in building a reflexive practice partly lay in the structural design of the study; which involved multiple parties, each of whom bought different expectations, skill sets and capacities. At the apex was the commissioning organization, which was more concerned with the ultimate research product and the design of data collection tools over the processes that were used to engage with research participants. This is characteristic of NGO operations And creates a tension with the need to go slow, listen and think deeply and to continually ask questions about one’s own posture as a researcher. The NGO espouses a set of claimed values about putting children’s best interests first, but staff tend to assume that they know what is best when it comes to engaging with children. Some resistance towards deeply scrutinizing their own posture when they interact with a child. They struggled to jettison the hat that they wore as advocates for children and to adopt a new hat that would require them to undertake a disciplined research practice. This involves setting aside preconceptions, listening deeply, creating space for the child to narrate their stories and not prematurely and partially interpreting the children’s stories.
- Getting out of the way and creating space for "beneficiaries" to tell us what we need demands something from us It demands that we Appreciate from the outset that it takes time to design and build the skills of the data collectors to look and listen before making assumptions. And the greater the number and the more diverse the people involved, the greater the amount of time and attention needs to be paid to building a shared understanding, commitment and practice to reflexive research.