Neoliberalism and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems on Childhood Vulnerability in Zimbabwe: Okere’s Cultural Hermeneutics Perspective

Over the past three decades, there has been increasing discussion of “vulnerable” children in the world’s international development and humanitarian aid literature. The deleterious outbreak of the HIV and AIDS pandemic and the abject poverty in economically distressed economies have prompted the unprecedented increase of childhood vulnerability in the global south. Notwithstanding the proliferation of neoliberal-based humanitarian interventions to mitigate the abovementioned phenomenon, its detrimental effects on the indigenous understanding of childhood vulnerability surpassed the remedial expectations of the local communities. The neoliberal international humanitarian construction of childhood vulnerability distorted the local indigenous knowledge. For instance, the aid acronym OVC for orphans and vulnerable children was created at the height of the African AIDS epidemic to include children “at risk” because of the disease and ephemerally replaced the indigenous understanding. The ideological rivalry in implementing the neoliberal and indigenous traditional strategies in the global south might be due to the lack of diplomatic mediation epistemologies that promotes synergy and harmony between them. Underpinned by the historical and cultural hermeneutics epistemological perspective, this theoretical paper seeks to unravel the feasibility of merging neoliberalism and the African Indigenous Knowledge System in dealing with the challenges of childhood vulnerability in the global south and Zimbabwe. This qualitative desktop research examines the impact of the neoliberal humanitarian construction of childhood vulnerability in the global south. This chapter concluded that the childhood vulnerability concept has shifted from its local indigenous understanding due to neoliberal humanitarian interventions. Therefore, this study recommends an epistemic deconstruction of the childhood vulnerability concept from the international humanitarian ideologies and practices and the contradictory value systems promulgated to strengthen the indigenous knowledge systems.