In the streets of Bamako, outside the markets of Timbuktu, or beneath the palaver tree of Ségou, a reality has quietly run through Malian society for generations: child fostering. This practice, deeply rooted in West African family systems, nevertheless remains one of the least documented phenomena by the institutions responsible for child protection.
It was this observation that guided eight years of ethnographic fieldwork, conducted between Mali and several West African countries, which today form the foundation of the Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org's mission.
A Cultural Practice Between Solidarity and Vulnerability
Child fostering is not, in itself, a problematic practice. For centuries, it has organized extended family solidarity: a child entrusted to an uncle, an aunt, or a distant relative may gain access to education, vocational training, or simply support that their family of origin could not provide. In many cases documented in the field, in both Ségou and Timbuktu, fostering remains a mechanism for protection and the redistribution of resources between families.
But this same practice, when it unfolds outside any protective framework, can also become the tipping point toward situations of serious vulnerability. Our fieldwork has documented the trajectories of children fostered without any guarantee of schooling, payment, or protection — girls working as domestic help denied schooling from a very young age, boys entrusted to Quranic teachers ending up begging in the streets of Bamako, or children displaced by security crises in the North, fostered in emergency conditions without any institutional safety net.
A Blind Spot in Child Protection Policies
What stands out, after eight years of participant observation, in-depth interviews and life story collection, is the near-total absence of systematic study of this phenomenon by institutional actors — whether the State, non-governmental organizations, or international agencies. Fostering is often mentioned in passing, as one variable among others in the analysis of street children or child labor, but rarely studied in its own right, in its full cultural and social complexity.
This gap has a concrete consequence: child protection programmes, designed without a nuanced understanding of the logic underlying fostering, struggle to offer responses suited to local realities. A purely legal or strictly humanitarian approach, one that ignores the cultural dynamics at play, risks either having no effect at all, or weakening solidarity mechanisms that, when properly framed, genuinely protect children.
Toward an Approach Grounded in Field Knowledge
This is precisely the space the Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org intends to occupy. Our conviction, grounded in eight years of rigorous scientific work, is that an in-depth understanding of cultural realities is the first tool for social change in the service of childhood. Understanding why a family entrusts a child, under what conditions, and with what expectations on both sides, makes it possible to build responses that do not oppose local practices but transform them from within — drawing notably on Traditional Authorities and Legitimacies, the first witnesses and often the first regulators of these situations.
The Network today continues this documentation work, now also incorporating an essential nutritional dimension: many children fostered under precarious conditions show signs of food vulnerability that likewise remain largely invisible in official statistics.
Documenting to Protect Better
This research work only makes sense if it leads to action. This is why the Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org now supports organizations, institutions and local authorities wishing to better understand these realities in order to respond to them more effectively — through programme evaluation, training for field actors, or support in developing public policies genuinely rooted in West African cultural practices.
To discuss this work or explore a potential collaboration, contact us at contact@enfanceafrique.org.
Talibé children begging amid Bamako traffic. Exposed to the dangers of the street and denied schooling, these children illustrate the fragile boundary between traditional religious transmission and exploitation — a vulnerability still largely absent from child protection policies.