Child Sponsorship as Development Education in the Northern Classroom

Abstract

Child sponsorship (CS) marketing has been described as the preeminent lens through which many people in the Global North see the South (Smillie, 2000, p.121). Since the 1980s the repetitive use of images of malnourished, unclothed, sad and de-contextualized children by some international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) has been questioned and it remains apparent that ‘…no matter how effective the image, the message can be very destructive’ (Coulter, 1989 p.2). A growing body of literature has emerged, concerned with the portrayal of the ‘Other’, particularly with the narrow format of a close-up picture of a passive child that CS has so often used (Manzo, 2008). Ongoing speculation suggests that some messages and images continue to ‘ignore Northern complicity in creating inequality’ while they ‘portray people as helpless victims, dependent, and unable to take action…’ (Plewes and Stuart in Bell and Coicaud, 2007, p.24). Further, the positioning of children at the centre of advocacy, advertising and interventions has led to claims that the dominant image of the child in many CS campaigns may have become a symbol for many places and people in the Global South (Paech, 2004; Strüver, 2007). As such, a more recent concern about CS marketing is that people in entire regions of the Global South may come to be seen by Northern donors as needy, passive and childlike through the dominance of CS representations (Dogra, 2012).KeywordsYoung PeopleDevelopment EducationWorld VisionGlobal CitizenshipGlobal PovertyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.