Despite progressive policies regarding the rights and incorporation of children's issues into Ethiopia's sustainable development plans, child labour bondage, where a child's service is given in exchange for a family loan, remains prevalent in the Awi Zone of the Amhara Region, Ethiopia. Despite this, child labour bondage has been absent from the academic debate on children's issues in Ethiopia, and little is known about the topic. This project investigates how child labour bondage is a central aspect of life among several families in the agrarian society in the Awi Zone.
Based on ethnographic materials collected through a range of methods involving interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and archival analysis, the project will shed light on how economic motives intersect with socio-cultural ones to perpetuate child labour bondage, and how this phenomenon affects the lives of these children and their families. It will bring new insights that fill the gap and expand the frontiers of knowledge of the complex system of child abuse, neglect, and exploitation. Finally, the findings will pave the way for tailored interventions to identify ways to liberate these children from bondage, bring them back to school, and reintegrate them into the education system.
Prof. Aschalew Abeje Lakew
Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia) | Social Anthropology, Migration Studies
E-mail: aschalew.lakew@college-uaruhr.de
Aschalew Abeje Lakew is Associate Professor of Migration Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia). He has published influential works in his area of specialisation, with a particular emphasis on the underlying mechanisms of internal and transnational migration, as well as the challenges and opportunities related to these phenomena on the social structure in Ethiopia, especially the Amhara Region. Since 2002 he has been engaged in various positions as a graduate assistant, lecturer, and assistant professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Bahir Dar University. In this capacity, he has been involved in research projects and community engagement initiatives, for instance on combating child migration and human trafficking in Ethiopia, and he has taught several courses on theories of anthropology, qualitative / ethnographic research methods, transnationalism and migration studies. In an administrative role, he has served as Vice-Dean for Research and Community Services of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Bahir Dar University.
Anja Tervooren is Full Professor of Education with a focus on childhood research at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her work focuses on childhood and difference, theories and methodology in educational studies, as well as gender and disability in childhood and youth. Currently, she is working with a group of researchers at the universities Wuppertal and Duisburg-Essen to investigate the (de)institutionalisation of education. Her individual project investigates early childhood between child day care, and integration assistance. Moreover, she works on questions of methodology and specialises in the field of ethnography, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches.
After completing her PhD in educational anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin on the topic of gender in childhood, Anja Tervooren worked at Goethe University Frankfurt and as a junior professor specialising in education and culture at the University of Hamburg. She is strongly involved in the German Educational Research Association (GERA) | Deutsche Gesellschaft für Erziehungswissenschaft (DGfE), of which she was also Chair, and she has published numerous books and essays on the fundamentals of educational science and the topic of unequal upbringing.