Community perspectives on children’s rights in a multi-ethnic town in Ethiopia

Despite the growing body of literature on how the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) ‘translates’ into local realities, there is limited knowledge on the ways in which community members who have a stake in childhood understand and interpret discourses of children’s rights in Ethiopia. Drawing on fieldwork involving interviews and focus group discussions, this paper discusses the tensions and controversies that the ‘language’ of children’s rights has created in a local community that is characterized by high levels of childhood poverty. It is argued that child–family relations are mediated in and through familial, social, cultural, and economic contexts and constraints. The views of community members regarding children’s rights include one that sees it as ‘hope’ and mere rhetoric that heightens unmet expectations on the one hand and, on the other, as a ‘fad’ that will disappear when NGOs leave communities. Ethiopian children earn their rights and, unlike what the UNCRC emphasizes, the rights they are entitled to are met not because of their citizenship to the nation state, but due to their contributions to and continued involvements in reproducing the daily lives of family collectives. The paper further reveals how children are seen by society as members of complex family systems to whom they owe duties and obligations in return for the securing of their rights, existence and well-being. This has important implications to rethinking dominant ideologies linked to children’s rights and how to make them work for children in Ethiopia and beyond.