4 - Historical Approaches to Child Welfare in Ghana

Summary

Introduction

Ghana presents an interesting case study to explore the variability that exists in a given society in relation to the intersections, or interactions, between dominant children's rights norms and the lived realities of children and their families. In order to understand the plurality that this variability produces it is first important to take a long historical view to child welfare and the emergence of children's rights as a framework to guide policy interventions and public debates. Such an exercise helps to situate narratives about the plurality of childhoods within a broader historical, political, economic and cultural context. Thus, the next two chapters seek to provide the contextual background needed to explain the road upon which the country now known as Ghana travelled to reach the point whereby dominant children's rights language and thinking entered the lexicon used nationally to discuss children's welfare, wellbeing and interests in this context.

This chapter, in particular, aims to track, from a historical perspective, strategies and approaches adopted to ensure the welfare and development of children's rights from the pre- colonial to the post- colonial period, with the view to trying to identify the point at which the concept of children's rights started being deployed to discuss issues of child welfare. While the structure of the chapter is set out chronologically, it is important to understand that I do not view the adoption of the approaches discussed in this chapter as a linear process, especially in relation to those discussed in the section I refer to as the ‘pre- colonial’ era as these were not only prevalent during that period, but continue to serve as key strategies to secure child welfare for many families and communities, even today. Further, policies and approaches discussed during the colonial period continued to have an impact in the post- colonial period through the continued use of laws and policies established in the colonial period in the decades that followed the country's achievement of independence from Britain, including in the present day.