Resilience in Childrearing Under Forced Migration: The Case of Selected Mothers and Elders at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe (2013-2016)

Abstract

Socio-political conflicts in the Great Lakes Region of Africa have caused an upsurge in the refugees who flee to other regions of the world for safety. Consequently, refugee camps have become common contexts of child growth and development owing to the forced movements of people from their original homes and countries into foreign and unfamiliar ecologies. This article reports part of the findings of a larger exploratory sequential study that explored the nature and quality of refugee immigrant caregivers’ childrearing practices at Tongogara Refugee Camp (TRC) in Zimbabwe. This study reports the resilience in childrearing among selected refugee immigrant caregivers resident at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe between 2013 and 2016. Eighteen (18) refugee mothers and thirteen (13) elders purposively sampled among refugees from DRC, Burundi and Rwanda participated in a qualitative study that used focus group discussions and key informant interviews to collect data. The main finding of the study was that under forced migration conditions, refugee immigrant caregivers become resilient and continue to raise their children despite their traumatic profiles and circumstances. Their resilience emerges from the possession of cultural psychological resources that protect them from traumatic profiles interfering with their child rearing. In addition, it was evident that reconstructed family networks, support from refugee elders as vicars of culture and resistance to psychosocial risk were other mediating factors. The study concluded that psychological cultural templates and reconstructed social networks are strong protective factors for the resilience of refugee caregivers. The key implication for the study is that social actors delivering services in refugee camps should integrate relevant cultural heritage issues in their programmes because they act as protective factors for traumatic experiences that may interfere with child rearing. Sensitive child development programmes are not complete when they exclude children’s socio-cultural context as an important variable.