A father and son run a butcher's shop in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Vipez/Flickr. Creative Commons.
Development organisations from NGOs like Save the Children and Plan International to government departments like the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) all place youth and child well-being at the centre of their campaigns and interventions in developing countries. Likewise, measures to improve the health and well-being of children constitute core components of policy development. Indeed, several of the Millennium Development Goals directly target children and young people. These interventions and policies rely on the conception of children as especially vulnerable and deserving of rescue that has circulated in popular culture, news and policy since at least the early nineteenth century. At the same time these organisations frame their actions within international law, particularly the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to give legitimacy to their right to act on behalf of (other people’s) children.
More recently, children (especially the ‘girl-child’) have been tasked with no less a project than the economic development of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as the eradication of world poverty. This can be seen, for example, in Nike’s ‘The Girl Effect’ campaign and Plan International’s ‘Weapons of Mass Construction’. So, what might be wrong with saving children, tasking girls with eradicating world poverty, and implementing rights for children?
