‘Our children are neither here nor there’: an ethnographic look at children’s right to education in Southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Knowledge about how social changes affect children’s access to education in Africa is still limited. Intending to bridge this gap, this article discusses the effect of the emerging social changes on children’s right to indigenous knowledge and formal education among the Guji people− the agro-pastoral society in Ethiopia. The article demonstrates how children’s present realities deprive their right to not only school education but also the indigenous ways of learning. It presents that the fast-changing social realities among the agro-pastoral society impacted children’s right to education in two ways. Firstly, the changes affect the indigenous ways of intergenerational knowledge transmission. Secondly, the changes constrained the quality of children’s learning in school and limited the relevance of formal education for children’s local ways of life. Data discussed in this article were collected through six months of ethnographic fieldwork among the Guji people in southern Ethiopia.

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