This article addresses the potential widespread conflict between the development of energy access projects and human rights risks and violations in Africa. While this conflict is well known in the continent of Africa due largely to the need to increase energy access, solutions to tackle it are scarce. This article proposes using the United Nations (UN) Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) strategically to create a new framework to conceptualize and solve such conflict. For this purpose, it analyses the effectiveness of the HRBA framework, whilst highlighting some of the challenges facing its implementation in African countries. The article concludes that until human rights risks and violations – considered to be ‘energy injustice’ concerns – are mainstreamed through the HRBA framework and its principles into the plan and development of energy access projects, the conflict will continue to rise and may become another dilemma similar to the environmental protection and energy development discourse in Africa.
Child labour continues to be a global problem affecting children and families across the globe. It is work performed by a child that is likely to interfere with their education or harm their health, physical, mental, moral, or social development. To address the problem, the international community agreed to adopt different legal frameworks on child labour. Malawi ratified these international human rights instruments and has even enacted domestic legislation to overcome the problem. Furthermore, initiatives that include the legal ban on child labour, access to education initiatives, poverty alleviation programmes, and direct interventions by governments and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on incentive-based schemes have been implemented to combat the problem. Despite these efforts, child labour is increasing, especially in the agricultural sector. In this study, I argue that there is a gap between the promise the legal framework gives children of addressing child labour and the reality of the problem. Thus, the existing legal framework on child labour fails to operate to cure child labour, mainly as a result of contextual barriers outside and within the law. At its core, the thesis argues that children in Malawi experience their childhood in a context where they are expected to work for their households’ survival strategies and as expected by the community. The thesis demonstrates that if the gap between the legal frameworks on child labour and the reality of child labour on the ground is to be addressed, there is a need to reimagine and restate the notion of childhood through the lens of integrated childhood. This new integrated childhood perspective acknowledges the reality that children's roles are incorporated into household survival strategies and community expectations, which sometimes diverge from the legally framed notion of childhood and child labour captured in international and Malawi's legal frameworks. The study explores its research questions by employing socio-legal research methods that first involve desk research, followed by empirical field research that incorporates Theatre for Development (TfD) as a research approach. Through a performative analysis in the TfD process, the child labour legal framework is examined alongside the communities’ lived realities to explore both analytical and practical solutions to the problem of child labour in Malawi.
The Swahili poetry of the master poet Fumo Liyongo, which dates between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, draws much of its imagery from the Indian Ocean, and in a particularly sensuous way: the poems paint baroque tableaux of Swahili material culture, evoking multiple elsewheres. They conjure the Indian Ocean through tastes, scents, and views of its rich interiors, which delineate a distinctively coastal world implicated to different degrees in the vaster oceanic region. Borrowing from aesthetic theories, the article explores the poem’s sensuality as a productive way of “thinking” about Indian Ocean relations, namely as a continual reemergence of cycles of sensation, questioning the clear-cut dichotomy of the “exterior” world and “intimate” notions of irreducible personhood as well as notions of local and cosmopolitan. Zeroing in on the betel quid, which has turned into a “mythological” cultural node of Swahili identity as well as a prominent rhetorical topos of Swahili love poetry, this article explores its imaginative productivity.
