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Co-operative childcare in Derg-era Ethiopia
The Centre for African Studies and CRFR welcome the anthropologist Dr Sarah Howard, Anthropologist and Researcher from Birkbeck, University of London for an in-person event.
Dr Howard will share her research on Co-operative childcare in Derg-era Ethiopia.
When: Weds 14th February 2024. 15.30 – 17.00
Where: Hugh Robson Building, Lecture Theatre G.04
The provision of pre-school care in cooperative institutions was central to socialist re- imaginings of women’s role in society under the Derg government (1974 – 1991) in Ethiopia. Intensive debates on ‘the woman question’ by Ethiopian activists in the student movement pre- and post-revolution saw childcare as central to women’s liberation through the Leninist principle of socialising women’s domestic work. The rapid expansion of kindergartens in revolutionary Ethiopia from 40 in 1974 to around 560 by 1982 was achieved largely through mass organisations, most notably Urban Dweller’s Associations, or urban kebeles, and the Revolutionary Ethiopian Women’s Association (REWA), from 1980. Kebeles were the outcome of the land reform process, in response to revolutionary demands for ‘land to the tiller’, and were responsible for community-level social services, while REWA was established by proclamation and focused on women’s participation at community level. Such state socialist organisations are often excluded from debates on community participation and activism on the grounds of autonomy, ignoring the significance of such movements and the agency of the women involved in them. This paper draws on research into REWA and kebele-run kindergartens, and the women who worked to establish them and to provide care for children.
This event is organised by the Centre of African Studies
Sarah Howard is an anthropologist and a researcher on the Wellcome Trust-funded Connecting Three Worlds project, which is pioneering a new history of global health that incorporates the socialist world. Sarah’s contribution to the C3W project will explore the contours, origins, and collaborative co-production of Derg-era public health, and trace its contemporary legacies in Ethiopia. She is based at Birkbeck, University of London, in the School of Historical Studies, and was previously an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She is working on a book for Cambridge University Press, which is an ethnographic exploration of the everyday rural state in Ethiopia through the lives and aspirations of its lowest level workers, and is also developing a new project, a historical-ethnographic account of early-years childcare in Ethiopia.