WEAVING CHILDREN'S RIGHTS WITH THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAND

Editorial by Dr Drahmane Fondo, President of Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org

« I have met hundreds of children and families across West Africa. In the streets of Bamako, in the villages of Ségou, in the households of northern Mali. Each carries within them a singular trajectory — a fostered child, a disputed piece of land, a divided community, a return after crisis — that our institutional frameworks still struggle to fully grasp. This network was born to give voice and scientific rigour to these realities that are too often forgotten. »

— Dr Drahmane Fondo, Bamako

📊 OUR IMPACT IN KEY FIGURES

– Hundreds: of vulnerable children and families met, many of whom individually documented and followed across Mali.

– 8 years: of immersive ethnography and multi-sited fieldwork across West Africa.

– 7: Indexed scientific publications in leading international journals.

– 9: West African countries covered by our comparative analyses and mediation networks.

– A growing network of multidisciplinary researchers and experts mobilizable across West Africa.

– 6: Strategic areas of expertise serving child protection, social cohesion, and food security.

Dear friends, partners and donors,

Allow me to welcome you to the action and research space of the Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org. We have co-built this platform — researchers, humanitarian practitioners, legal experts and Traditional Authorities — around a central paradigm: the fine-grained analysis of cultural and anthropological realities is the first tool for effective child protection and social cohesion policy.

Drawing on a long-standing commitment to research-action, I have scientifically documented these dynamics, from Mali's rural areas to Bamako's urban survival spaces. What this ground-level work brings to light goes beyond mere humanitarian emergency: it reveals a major methodological gap, one whose scope extends far beyond the field of childhood alone. The practice of child fostering, like many other customary mechanisms of social regulation — land conflict management, intercommunity reconciliation, reintegration of displaced populations — remains the poor relation of public policy and international aid programmes in West Africa. This lack of interest in anthropological and endogenous approaches largely explains the relative ineffectiveness of conventional projects, whether aimed at addressing the phenomenon of street children or preventing the tensions that weaken our communities.

Beyond the Numbers: An Indictment of a Broken System

What our fieldwork reveals is not simply one more humanitarian crisis; it is the unflinching indictment of our collective failures — failure in protecting our children, failure in managing our community tensions, failure in the way we have allowed the mechanisms that, for generations, had regulated the life of our societies to fall apart. While African capitals and the headquarters of international agencies pride themselves on ratified protocols and paper charters, the reality of the asphalt, the bush, and the zones of tension screams a truth no one wants to hear. We have abandoned our children and let our communities fracture in the name of desk theories and parachuted aid projects.

It is time to lift the veil on the hypocrisy of our approaches to protection and social cohesion:

The fiction of "paper laws": To believe that a legislative arsenal, however rigorous, is enough on its own to curb the exploitation of a 12-year-old girl, the derailment of a young talibé, or the outbreak of a land conflict between two communities, is a methodological illusion. Legal norms, however essential, remain dead letters as long as they fail to connect with the realities of socio-economic hardship and the community regulation codes that alone still govern the daily lives of millions of families.

The corruption of our traditions: Let us have the courage to say it: under the pressure of a predatory economy and the erosion of our ancestral solidarities, the noble practice of fostering from our lands has, in too many cases, turned into a network of silent exploitation and modern-day slavery — and this same erosion of age-old solidarities now fuels endless land conflicts, intercommunity ruptures, and reintegration difficulties for entire populations displaced by crises. To turn a blind eye to these abuses under the pretext of respecting culture is a guilty complicity.

The blindness of aid programmes: Standardized interventions costing millions of dollars systematically fail because they refuse to understand the anthropology of our societies. Emergency kits are distributed where the ethical foundations of our communities need to be rebuilt, their internal tensions patiently defused, and direct negotiations held with those who hold moral authority on the ground — whether the goal is to protect a child or reconcile two villages. This is not a plea for pity. It is a call for rupture. Continuing with the same bureaucratic methods while hoping for different results is no longer a mistake — it is a moral failing toward future generations.

A Strategic and Multidisciplinary Vision for West Africa

The Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org, supported by AMAPISE, (Malian Association for the Support and Promotion of Endogenous Know-How Initiatives) offers a break-through social engineering. Our methodology rejects sterile opposition: we combine the rigour of social sciences, the legitimacy of customary and spiritual leaders, and the operational demands of development agencies — in the service of child protection as much as the social cohesion of our communities.

Child protection, like the preservation of the social fabric, does not stop at national borders. Whether it concerns early marriage in Niger (which still affects 76% of young girls), talibé mobility in Senegal, the drift of the Vidomégon system in Benin and Togo, or cross-border trafficking toward Côte d'Ivoire, the challenges facing children demand a coordinated response at the sub-regional level. This same need for coordination applies to land conflicts crossing porous borders, intercommunity tensions spilling from one country to another, and the movements of populations displaced by security crises in the Sahel — all challenges to which only mediation engineering designed at the regional level can bring a lasting response.

OUR OPERATIONAL PILLARS FOR PARTNERSHIPS

1. Knowledge Production: Scientifically model the dynamics of childhood and communities in West Africa to inform decision-making.

2. Data Accessibility: Provide decision-makers with resources from field research, directly usable in their programmes.

3. Legal Pluralism: Build functional bridges between formal positive law and customary regulations, whatever the nature of the dispute at hand.

4. Endogenous Mediation: Mobilize and train Traditional Authorities and networks of traditional communicators for child protection and community conflict resolution.

5. Capacity Building: Support social action actors, institutions and communities through high-level modules in project engineering, mediation, and monitoring and evaluation.

6. Nutrition and Food Security: Provide expertise and advisory support on nutrition and food security issues in West Africa.

Dr Drahmane Fondo
President of the Réseau EnfanceAfrique.org