African Values And Child Rights PDF Download

Different African communities share some commonalities in their understanding of childhood. There are similarities between how communities in Africa see and treat children and the image of childhood in the child rights treaties. However, there are significant differences. There is a duty of care to ensure that the cultural norms and values that inform the conception of childhood in Africa are accommodated reasonably if children's rights treaties in Africa are to be meaningfully implemented.In this book, I highlight how this can be done and the cost of being culturally insensitive when advocating for children's rights in Africa. Such a failure will, at the least, increases the economic and social costs of implementing children's rights in many African communities. Second, implementing children's rights norms that some communities in Africa consider as alien without adopting those norms to the African context will continue to increase local communities' resistance to children's rights. Such an approach will be seen as replacing local cultural values with alien cultural norms, which could cause a multiple-lived experience for children, weakened family structures and support, and possibly compromised cultural identities of children. To minimise the negative consequences when communities perceive children's rights as an alien imposition, the book recommends applying the norms in these two children's rights treaties in a context-and child-specific manner. It is further argued that a 'universal pluralistic' theoretical framework will facilitate reasonable deference to local contexts that further the cause of children's rights and wellbeing. It is argued that such an approach will ensure mutual accommodation between the norms provided for in the children's rights treaties and the cultural values of communities in Africa.