Options for Africa’s Child Welfare Systems from Nigeria’s Unsustainable Multicultural Models

Abstract

The sustainability of Africa’s existing child welfare systems remains uncertain, potentially owing to the maltreatment of children amid the competing worldviews of the continent’s indigenous and non-indigenous practices and international childcare models. This article focuses on Nigeria’s unsustainable multicultural child welfare system in order to highlight the inherent challenges of child welfare systems in Africa and proffer remedies. Seven discernible trends derived from available indigenous sources of information and scholarly literature on Nigeria are used as mind maps to describe and discuss Nigeria’s multicultural characteristics and childcare practices. From the discussion, the country’s child welfare challenges manifest in the following forms: ethnocultural, or more specifically, ethnoreligious diversity; the infiltration of Nigeria by non-native worldviews; colonial legacies; vacillating post-colonial social policies; conceptual ambiguities in non-indigenous welfare terminologies; and persistent unnecessary professional rivalries, which are also present in other African countries. As remedies, three transformative response options for the sustainability of the Nigerian child welfare system and those of other African countries are recommended: embracing cultural relativity regarding child maltreatment, leveraging the transformative and expanded mandates of the social work profession for the development of effective and sustainable child welfare systems, and using research and systems thinking as a driver for transforming professional rivalries into multidisciplinary approaches.