Valentina Mazzucato gives a Presentation at the Aix-Marseille University
On 11 May 2017, professor Valentina Mazzucato gave a presentation at the Aix-Marseille University in Provence, France, titled ‘Children’s wellbeing in transnational families - a view from African countries’.
Presentation summary:
Studies on the effects of parental migration on children who stay in the home country are primarily based on migrant parents’ accounts. These studies indicate that parents and children suffer emotionally from the separation. Furthermore, most studies are based on data from Latin America or Asia. Yet when interviewing children in African countries a more variegated picture emerges. In the Transnational Child Raising Arrangements (TCRA) projects we studied children’s emotional well-being through mixed methods and multi-sited research designs conducted in three African countries: Ghana, Angola, and Nigeria. What emerged is that transnational families can have different characteristics, and it is these characteristics that determine whether children fare well or not. This nuances previous studies that identified parental migration as the sole characteristic affecting children’s wellbeing in transnational families. This presentation will explain the living arrangements that African children live in whilst their parents migrate internationally, how the different transnational family characteristics impinge upon their wellbeing, and how contextual factors such as child fostering and social parenthood practices, as well as war and post-conflict settings help to explain the similarities and differences between the three countries and between our findings and those of previous studies in Latin America and Asia.
MO-TRAYL has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 682982)
