Hannah Niedenführ

Dissertation project: Child migration in Burkina Faso

Child migration is a common phenomenon in West Africa, albeit one that often receives little attention from academics and the general public. One form of migration in which children migrate is entrustment ('confiage'): In the Burkinabe context, a rough distinction can be made between in-network and out-of-network entrustment. In traditional confiage, children are entrusted to relatives (internal to the network), whereas in the migration of talibé to Koranic schools, children are entrusted to complete strangers (external to the network). The planned work aims to examine these two different types of confiage with regard to their function for translocal networks and everyday (survival) strategies of vulnerable population groups. The aim is to compare why parents opt for the in-network or out-of-network form of entrustment. Another focus of the study is the social negotiation of these forms of child migration: how are they perceived and by whom, and what efforts can be identified to influence child migration, e.g. in the context of policies or aid programs? This approach to child migration addresses a structural gap in migration research, in which the migration of children has hardly been considered to date.