This is the first book that examines Ghana's compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Ghana being the first country to ratify the Convention, it thus fills an important gap in the literature on Ghana. The book throws a searchlight on a wide range of rights issues including children's identity, violence against children and women, child exploitation and children in conflict with the law plus a host of other CRC related issues and further identifies and explains the main obstacles in the way of realizing children's rights in Ghana. A major strength of this book is that the contributors, Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians alike have vast experience in empirical research in Ghana and most importantly, come from diverse academic disciplines. Researchers, instructors, and students of Social Work, Sociology, Criminology Human Rights, Education and Law, are examples of a few academic disciplines that would find this book a welcome relief in their search for relevant and current data on children's issues in Ghana. It should also be of great interest to policy makers, human rights activists, Children's NGOs and international development partners interested in children's issues.

All recent books on international social work mention Africa only briefly and few engage with the broader field of development studies. This book focuses solely on the unique African context engaging with issues relating to social work and development more broadly thus enabling a deeper examination and more complex and nuanced picture to emerge. Unlike most academic works, this book highlights multiple practitioner voices, with authors or co-authors that have recently been or are currently practising social workers. As an edited book, it draws from both academic research as well as lived practice experience, supported by strong theoretical positioning and guidance in introductory chapters, drawing on African literature, wherever possible. Looking at case-studies from Lesotho, Botswana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Namibia, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Rwanda, Zambia and Tanzania and covering established areas of practice such as child protection; working with older people; working with people with disabilities; mental health; and mainstream services targeting women as well as emerging areas of developmental social work practice, such as humanitarian assistance in post-conflict situations; work with immigrants and refugees; and the training of community-based workers, this book takes a future-oriented perspective that aims to move beyond well-worn critiques to envision constructive and sustainable futures for social work and social development in Africa from a critical perspective.

What is poverty and how does it affect family life and children in particular? How should children from an early age be socialized to menial labor? This seven-year research seeks to understand how girls are socialized in a modern traditionalistic society that is bent on stripping them of normal childhood and destined for a life of back-breaking and dangerous manual street labor for a long stretch of time in order to put food on the family table without quality of life and education for a career.

In recent years, the world has seen unprecedented attention and political commitment to addressing malnutrition. Milestones such as the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, the Lancet Maternal and Child Nutrition Series, and the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) have marked the rapid rise of nutrition on the global policy and research agenda. These developments reverse years of relative neglect for nutrition. Undernutrition is a global challenge with huge social and economic costs. It kills millions of young children annually, stunts growth, erodes child development, reduces the amount of schooling children attain, and increases the likelihood of their being poor as adults, if they survive. Stunting persists through a lifetime and beyond—underweight mothers are more likely to give birth to underweight children, perpetuating undernutrition across generations. Undernutrition reduces global gross domestic product by US$1.4–$2.1 trillion a year—the size of the total economy of Africa south of the Sahara.