An Ethnographer’s Time in Mwanza : Reflecting Tanzanian Children’s Experiences of Poverty

In my master’s thesis I have aimed to find out what kind of experiences Tanzanian children attending public schools have about poverty, and how these experiences are related to the poverty experiences of Northern European children. This thesis has been done with a phenomenological epistemology and a holistic idea of man. Following the framework of childhood sociology I understand children as active agents. Within this framework, I want to bring out the voices of children behind the statistics about child poverty. Plenty of research has been done on child poverty, but the children’s own experiences are seldom listened to. This is especially true for children in developing countries, who at the same time appear in countless pictures provided by international charities. This creates an illusion of poor children being far away, and nowhere near us. However, as research on childhood poverty experiences has revealed, Northern European children have diverse experiences of poverty as well. To lessen the comparison and simplification, I have found it important to listen to children themselves and to reflect Tanzanian and Northern European children’s experiences. I carried out my ethnographic field work in the beginning of 2018 while I did a three-month social work apprenticeship in a small and local NGO working with families in the Tanzanian city of Mwanza. As a part of my weekly work in the organization, I organized group sessions for two groups of children aged 8–16, who were living in small mountain villages. It was in these groups that I gathered most of my research material, through group discussions, writing tasks, and drawings. In addition, I also wrote notes in my daily life. As an ethnographer, I reflected everything I saw to the context of Finland and to the literature review I had previously made about Northern European children’s experiences of poverty. Hence, I have had a reflective approach to my work all the way. I approached my material by qualitative content analysis, and soon recognized that it contains some of the categories found in Northern European research on children’s experiences of poverty.A central finding of this study is that Tanzanian children’s experiences of poverty are indeed quite similar to those of Northern European children. Both have experiences of poverty related to deprivation of basic needs, and the effect this deprivation causes on friendships is also pointed out. In addition, poverty causes tension in families, which stems from the contradiction between scarce resources and the demands of the environment. This tension requires children to use various coping strategies in order to balance between the family conditions, their own needs and the expectations of friends. The experienced deprivation of basic needs is described as deficiencies in food, school materials, clothes, home environment, and health. These deficiencies are in turn described as leading to experiences of alienation, otherness, bullying, and to the need of children to regulate the amount of money spent together with friends. However, the Tanzanian children also have experiences that cannot be found in Northern European studies. In the category of food deficiencies, these include the lack of food in schools, the obligation to participate in buying food for the household, and the shame that is put on buying unnecessary snacks. Additionally, some possibilities that are self-evident for all Northern European children raise doubt in Tanzanian children. These include possibilities to attend school, to get health care and to live at home instead of in the street. From the viewpoint of friendships, it is common for Tanzanian children to spend time in free play, whereas Northern European children often see paid hobbies as a must in order to participate fully. Further, the Tanzanian children are strong moral agents in teaching their friends in how to use money properly. Having respect for elders and a willingness to help parents is especially important to Tanzanian children. The strong authority of Tanzanian parents is seen in my material as a low level of communication between parents and children, for example in parents not sharing shame or economic trouble with their children.The children I have encountered present multiple explanations to poverty, and also share varied ways of helping poor people. The children see everyone’s role important in preventing poverty, and they hope for this work to be done together from the individual level all the way to the cultural level. In my work I have moved between different levels, considering individual situations and reflecting them culturally. The aim of this thesis is to bring new perspective on poverty as a phenomenon experienced by children.