Yaw Ofosu-Kusi

University of Energy and Natural Resources | UENR · Resource Enterprise and Entrepreneurship

This Special Issue of Childhood moves beyond stereotypical images of African children to document the complex ways in which contemporary realities and processes of social transformations shape and are shaped by children’s everyday lives. In this editorial, we bring together perspectives that are drawn from 10 articles that report findings from six...

Globalisation has fuelled rapid and unprecedented levels of urban expansion the consequences of which for children’s socialisation have been profound. ‘Urbanisation without industrialisation’ is how Davis (2006) terms this process, as economic dislocation, widening inequalities and rapid social change have undermined the capacity of cities to meet...

The economic hardships experienced by African countries in the late 1970s forced many of them to fall on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for financial relief. The two institutions’ reaction in almost all cases was to impose structural adjustment programmes (SAP) on those countries in an attempt to stabilize and grow their e...

This paper considers the agency of children moving to the streets of Accra, Ghana's capital city. A much used but largely unexamined concept, agency is nevertheless commonly deployed in childhood studies as a means to stress the capacity of children to choose to do things. In the literature on street and working children, and a cognate area of stud...

This paper considers the lives of children living in a large informal settlement in central Accra, Ghana. Its contention is that children remain largely absent from the renewal of interest in slums and that where they do feature it is largely as objects of risk and vulnerability. Such an exclusive focus, it is argued, risks effacing the ways in whi...

This paper considers the work and labour of children living on the streets of Accra, Ghana. It does so in two distinctive ways. First, it considers how the children's photographs of a day or two in their working lives, and the dialogues that go on in, through and around them, may contribute to the making of strong sociological arguments about child...

This article draws upon the use of photography to research the lives of children living in Accra, Ghana. Its aim is to consider method in visual research, and to reflect upon those modes of explanation and understanding that any consideration of method must require. It suggests a role for photography as a ‘vector’, as something capable of connectin...

This article considers friendship among street children in Accra. Drawing upon the findings of a three-year qualitative research project, the article argues that friendship is a neglected element of research yet cooperation, mutuality and exchange between friends are essential to street children’s survival. Living within the extremities of the urba...

This chapter considers photography as a means of seeing and knowing the lives of street children. Following what Ennew and Swart-Kruger (2003) note to be a ‘paradigm shift’ in thinking about the growing numbers of children who take to the streets of the cities of the developing world, in our research we have aspired to the production of collaborati...

What is discussed in this chapter is work-in-progress, an opportunity for reflection upon elements of an on-going research project examining the lives of street children in Accra, Ghana. Street children have received much research in recent years but our project is, we believe, distinctive in two respects. The first of these is that access to relia...

Introduction This paper offers some preliminary comments on the growing phenomenon of the migration of children from their rural places on origin to work on the streets of Accra, Ghana. It does so by drawing upon an on-going programme of research that is concerned more specifically with street children's working lives. It is informed by recent shif...