Jeans, Bicycles and Mobile Phones: Adolescent Migrants’ Material Consumption in Burkina Faso

Abstract

African children are rarely associated with globalization and the commercialization of childhood through consumerism, except for their participation in the global supply chain as child labor. ¹ Accordingly, they are represented as a uniform category despite the fact that great inequalities in wealth and opportunity exist both across and within countries. International discourses on child protection in the global South tend to see those entering the world of paid work as being deprived of their childhood (Bourdillon 2006; Nieuwenhuys 2007). Such discourses advocate an essentially Eurocentric and middle-class type of childhood in which work is not readily accepted as a means of accumulating practical and social skills and know-how (Bourdillon forthcoming; Razy and Rodet 2011). With the aim of protecting children from hazardous and exploitative work, young people up to the age of 18 are categorized as children (cf. International Labor Office [ILO] Convention No. 182). The idea that adolescents can migrate to find work on their own initiative and for material reasons beyond meeting basic needs is overshadowed by representations of migrant children as forced migrants, victims of trafficking or exploitation (cf. Robson 2010; Human Rights Watch 2007; ILO 2001, 2010).