Issues in and Challenges to Professionalism in Africa's Cultural Settings

Abstract

This article explores critical issues linked to early child development (ECD) professionalism in African childhood contexts in the light of rights-based consideration. Against the backdrop of acculturation being a reality in Africa, it accepts professionalism as a ‘good thing’ for ECD programmes in Africa. The article sketches a portrait of childhoods in African cultural settings and points to sensitive aspects of African child development that would require keen sensitivity from professionalization agendas. In particular, the article recognizes children in their changing families and hybridized cultural circumstances as social agents and ‘natural’ stakeholders of ECD professionalism. It reviews evidence that reveals African children as accredited contributors from an early age to their own developmental learning. Accordingly, African youngsters should be enlisted as partners to ECD professionalism in order to give them and their families participative spaces and a respectful voice in all ECD efforts. Given the coexistence of three ECD heritages in African families and communities today from Eastern, Western and indigenous African sources, a ‘blended approach’ is perhaps the most appropriate route to take towards ECD professionalism.