Working paper 1 (pdf - Institute of Education, University of London

There are some children who come from poor families but the parents and children are
disciplined. The little these parents have they try to use it to provide for their children.
While not as frequent as in the Kenyan data, similar comments “blaming the parents” are apparent in
the interviews in the South African school. For example, the head teacher links children dropping out
of school on poverty, but also on parents not caring:
No one motivates such children to attend school so they go and start working then the
parents become dependent on them for food and income.
Such lack of attendance is, in turn blamed for children becoming “Tsotsis [gangsters] and hooligans”.
The “blaming the parents” discourse is clearly very closely bound-up with the process of “distancing”
associated with identification of parents as poor (as well as illiterate, “non-Christian”, un-married etc).
Yet there seems to be very little questioning of why poverty is so entrenched in the areas, nor linking
of poverty with broader processes of discrimination and exploitation, reflecting the narrow framing of
poverty as a deficit and a characteristic of individuals or communities: the poor. Nor do there appear
to be efforts to engage parents in issues around their children‟s education – beyond providing material
assistance in some instances.
On the whole, when talking about poverty, interviewees did not make explicit links between poverty
and gender issues. There was no special dimension of poverty associated with women, men or
gender relations. The South African focus group questioned why it was being prompted to think about
this:
I think that in that school that the girls are not the only ones who are poor, who come from a
poor background. Maybe there are boys who are also poor.
However when asked about how poverty affects learners on the school some participants in both
schools drew on essentialised gendered identities to explain how men and women or girls and boys
live poverty differently. In Kenya, participants explained that boys go to the slums to work and poverty
is associated with boys using drugs. In focus group discussions meanwhile it was explained that
“there is poverty that at times makes the girls do things that do not favour their schooling” and that
there was a case of a girl who had taken on a sugar daddy who had promised to buy her bananas
(drawing on notions of poverty being antithetical to “morality‟). It is evident that commenting on
poverty was generally undertaken as a form of distancing and that the evocation of essentialised
identities of „loose‟ girls or boys who were poor was part of the demarcation of these boundaries.
The obligations of care which fall on girls (and women) are in some cases viewed as being a result of
poverty. When asked about the absenteeism of girls the Kenyan headteacher explained:
Well, difficult question. But to try it… one, maybe the parents have gone to look for the jobs
and maybe the girls are left with the young kids to take care of, or maybe there were some
problems at home… the mother goes somewhere, the girl is left with the brothers are sisters.
However he is keen to point out that boys may also take on care roles: though in this case in the
figure of family head and provider:
Now the others are maybe the boys… the bigger boy is left with the responsibility of the
home… they can go to the kibarua [casual work] to feed the family
In the context of ongoing poverty however, it appears that it is more often women or girls that pick up
– and are expected to pick up – the pieces. Girls take on care duties at home. In South Africa the
head teacher notes that where there are single parents these tend to be women:
[gender issues and poverty issues] are related to me – according to my way of thinking
because you find that a female, a person who‟s a female person, is the one who is looking
after the family.
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