Eight years ago, I began spending my days — and very often my nights, out on patrol — in the streets of Bamako, observing, listening, trying to understand. It is precisely this nighttime work that allowed me to distinguish between the different categories of children who populate the streets: those who spend the day there before going home, and those who never return. Not as a humanitarian worker coming to provide relief, but as an anthropologist coming to learn. This research became my doctoral thesis. Today, it has become a network.
West African societies are undergoing a profound and rapid transformation. Fast-paced urbanization, the monetization of social relationships, and growing economic individualism: within just a few decades, these changes are upending customary balances that had structured community life for generations.
Traditional child fostering — this ancestral practice of children circulating among kinship members, for purposes of education and family solidarity — illustrates this transformation with particular clarity. Yet it is only one of many manifestations of a broader phenomenon: that of customary mechanisms of social regulation being tested by a world changing faster than they can adapt.
Two findings from my fieldwork particularly struck me.
First, a reality more nuanced than I had initially formulated. Girls also occupy public space during the day — selling drinks, fruit, or street food — but they disappear at nightfall, leaving the street to boys alone. And among these boys, not all share the same fate: some return home in the evening, others stay, living and sleeping on the street. It is precisely these latter children who make up, for the most part, the true street children — often coming from a situation of traditional fostering diverted from its original protective purpose: the talibé entrusted to a Quranic teacher, or the child placed with a family that exploits him for domestic labor until he runs away, in response to the abuse suffered.
Second, a finding that challenges a persistent misconception: that deterioration occurs gradually, after the fact, triggered by a specific shock — a death, a remarriage, financial hardship within the host family. These tipping points do indeed exist, and my research allows me to isolate them with precision. But in many cases, deterioration does not occur after fostering: it is present within fostering itself, from the moment the child arrives. A tradition designed to fulfill a logic of family solidarity now finds itself, in the context of large African cities, mobilized according to logics of convenience that no longer always match the actual expectations or needs of the fostered child — nor, at times, those of the receiving family. The child may then suffer the consequences of this gap from the very moment of arrival, with no subsequent triggering event required.
It is this dual understanding — the identifiable tipping points, and the deterioration sometimes already at work within fostering itself — that gave rise to the Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org: the conviction that the most rigorous scientific research can, and must, translate into concrete levers for action for the communities it studies.
The Network, moreover, no longer limits itself to fostering alone. The same traditional mechanisms that regulate family tensions around a fostered child can, once mobilized, help defuse a land conflict or intercommunity tension. This is the very essence of the traditional mediation we are now developing through the Network, in partnership with Traditional Authorities and Legitimacies across several West African countries.
Understanding a society before seeking to transform it: this is an obvious truth too often forgotten in development policies. Yet it remains the only path toward solutions that last.
Learn more about our work: enfanceafrique.org