We interview Eliza Ngutuku about her book, Children's Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya: Going Beyond Multi-Dimensionality
Our member, Dr. Eliza Ngutuku (the London School of economics and Political science, UK), talks about her new book, Children's Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability in Kenya: Going Beyond Multi-Dimensionality (Routledge, 2025).
Q: What is this book about?
Children’s Lived Experience of Poverty and Vulnerability offers an account of children’s experience, framed within the national context of Kenya and comparable contexts. The book takes an unconventional approach by going beyond linear conceptions of child poverty and vulnerability as simply a matter of deprivations and lack, causes and effect.
Instead, the book maps out how various issues interact in complex ways to shape children’s lived experience. These issues include, for example, material lack, identity, social relations, discourses and representations, children’s agency and politics and representations, and participation in support programmes.
The book shows that children’s lived experience is located within relationships, places, and landscapes that people inhabit. In addition to examining complex issues at home, I also explore children’s experience at school, where they encounter difficulties in participation, and where school is seen as a way out of poverty. The book also considers children’s interactions with various support programmes, showing how these programmes, though aimed to get children out of poverty, are implicated in complex and non-linear ways in children’s impoverishment.
The book also deals with methodology, arguing that the methods we use to study children’s lived experience cannot be separated from that experience itself. I therefore demonstrate how the innovative methodological approach of ‘listening softly to children’s voice,’ which runs throughout the book, provides more nuanced insights into children’s experience. Overall, the book’s key argument is that we should be attentive to the complexity, interconnectedness, distinctiveness, fluidity, and contingency of children’s lived experience of poverty.
Q: What made you write this book?
The main impetus for writing this book was my day-to-day reflexivities – what I see as ‘fragments of my autobiography’ – developed over twenty years of working with children identified as poor and vulnerable, mainly in Africa. I study representations of childhood from both contemporary and historical perspectives, and I therefore wanted to engage the vulnerability zeitgeist in development discourse. However, as I reflected on these representations, I wanted to go beyond merely deconstructing them – an area that has been well explored. Instead, I sought to place these discourses and meanings within specific contexts.
I also noticed that children’s voice was missing from the dominant understanding of child poverty and vulnerability. Therefore, I wanted to bring their voice to the centre. However, in development discourse, ‘voice’ is commonly reduced to what children say, overlooking other ways through which children’s voice is expressed. I therefore aimed not only to incorporate children’s voice, but also to innovate around how we understand and engage with it.
As the title of the book suggests, I build on and enhance the current multi-dimensional approaches to child poverty, which are confined to dominant understandings of children’s rights. Instead, I place these rights within their relational, lived, and complex contexts of social vulnerability and children’s agency. In this sense, this book became a kind of social experiment. I was interested in exploring both what it means to be, and to be constructed as, a poor and vulnerable child. The cartographical questions and arguments in the book were inspired by Deleuzean philosophy of the rhizome, which emphasizes complexity, connectedness, and non-linearity.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter (pp. 2-3):
It was a hot sunny afternoon, six months into my fieldwork in Siaya, Kenya. I was going to see one of the caregivers who was fostering four children, whose mother had died a few months before the start of this research in 2016. On the way, I encountered Ayo, a 7-year-old girl I had seen the previous day, in the Early Childhood Development and Education (ECDE) Centre, also called an Early Childhood Care and Education Centre (ECCE). Her pseudonym denotes the way I encountered her, a nature of birth name that means ‘one who was born on the way’. Ayo was wearing a beautiful school uniform bought by her biological mother. Ayo had two mothers: her biological mother, who was dead, and her ‘other mother’ or her foster mother. The ‘other mother’, a distant relative, took her in with her two brothers and their then 18-month-old sister, Awino. Their first-born brother, who was 19 years old, was incarcerated after he got into conflict with the law after their mother’s sickness and death. Ayo’s mother had died of Chira, the local term for HIV/AIDS. Ayo was also taking dawa (Kiswahili word for medicine, also used as a euphemism for HIV/AIDS anti-retroviral drugs). Ben, Ayo’s 14-year-old brother, was a co-caregiver to their other siblings, along with the ‘other mother’. He combined schooling with selling Togo (straw for making mats) and burned charcoal for fuel to support their ‘other mother’, who worked on people’s farms for a living. Ben called his sisters and brother ‘our children’, a semantic kinship complex that denoted his caregiving roles. Their mother’s house, not far from the home of the other mother, was still locked, but Ben occasionally cleaned it out to connect with memories of their mother.
In this encounter, Ayo was happy to be transitioning to class one in the new year. Later in the year, she did not graduate with the other children. The teacher said she had a fee balance of Kenya shillings 400 or 4 Euros. As I prepared to pay for it, the teacher changed her story, saying that Ayo was not good enough academically and was afraid she would fail the class one entrance exams. According to Kenya’s education policy, Ayo was not supposed to pay school fees under the public ECCE and was not supposed to sit for class one entrance exams.
Ayo had two aunts and sisters to her mother. However, as Ben told me, their husbands did not want them to foster the children. But I also learned that some children did not want to leave their parents’ homes or their parents’ graves to become ‘outsider children’ in their relatives’ homes. Ayo, Awino, Ben, and Paul all shared a bed made of old clothes on the floor. Their aunt was occasionally buying them food. Even though Ayo and her siblings were part of the ‘other’ mother’s household, they sometimes lived like two households, distinguishing between their property, like cows, and that of the ‘other mother’.
The state, too, was relatively absent in their story. Before she died, Ayo’s mother was receiving the state Cash Transfer for Vulnerable Children (CT-OVC) grant. However, they were no longer receiving the grant because biometrics in the form of their mother’s fingerprints were required for proof of identity or even life in this regard. Following up on the grant was expensive and time-consuming for the ‘other mother’. Besides, she was a widow or literary referenced as Chi Liel, a wife of the grave, and she was receiving the same grant for her daughter. Therefore, she couldn’t receive the same grant twice since the two households had merged in the eyes of the state. The other mother was thus thinking of indirectly ‘hiring’ a caregiver to receive the cash grant on the children’s behalf, but she was a little worried she would not get somebody she could trust. A widow’s caregiver group subsidized Ayo’s ECCE centre, and she was taking a midday meal, a cup of fortified porridge. This was the only meal for the day for most children in this centre.
Ayo’s story of a poor and vulnerable child is not complete because it can never be. Her story is like a rhizome, fluid, changing, a map with many connections, fragmented but still holding together and a multiplicity. Her story is the story of children in this book. The book accounts for children’s lived experiences of poverty and vulnerability. This story begins not by describing what poverty and vulnerability mean for children that I encountered like Ayo. Instead, I present this experience as it unfolds, showing how differently located children’s experience in the different spaces of home, school and support programmes. Ayo’s story and that of other children show how different issues around poverty and vulnerability connect in their lives in complex ways. Like Ayo’s case, the book presents the experience of children, who sometimes live under the shadow of death and poverty but still negotiate in a context of hope and resilience.