Doctoral Student’s Study Examines How Culture Impacts Ghana’s Child Protection System
A recent article by doctoral student Priscilla Wilson explored how Ghana’s child protection system is impacted by the cultural dissonance between global rights-based mandates alongside local duty-oriented cultural practices. The study argued that the implementation gap is due to the cultural dissonance between the two rather than from a lack of resources.
“The goal of the study was to view Ghana’s child protection implementation gap as an interpretive rather than a technical issue,” she explained. “Instead of questioning if the system is effective, I inquired about how Ghana’s protection policies characterize childhood, family obligations, and child welfare, and how these definitions are shaped by global rights-based frameworks and local duty-based traditions.”
The study utilized a systematic review of 24 sources of policy documents, peer-reviewed articles, and reports to identify the gap in implementation and propose a resolution so that Ghanaian children and families do not fall through this gap.
“As a Ghanaian, I grew up seeing the quiet strength of family ties, extended families and communities caring for children in ways that formal systems often overlooked,” expressed Wilson. “I saw that most research on Ghana’s child protection system viewed its issues as a lack of resources. I thought that view was incomplete.”
Much of the existing literature on child protection in sub-Saharan Africa attributes implementation failures solely to a lack of resources such as funding, staffing, or infrastructure. This study challenged that assumption, indicating that cultural misalignment is also a critical factor in improving services and care.
The results of the study’s analysis demonstrated Wilson’s concern that cultural values often clash with the adoption of rights-based policies derived from global mandates. Ghana’s orientation towards duty-oriented values centered on commitment, duty, and social responsibilities with a strong communal perspective stands in contrast to the individualistic, Western values underlying many global child protection frameworks.
Key findings included:
- The “best interests of the child” principle, preserved in Ghana’s Children’s Act and Constitution, is used less as a foundational operational standard and more as a morally flexible guideline. Frontline workers and communities often reinterpret this guideline through a more localized cultural lens, prioritizing lineage, family integrity, and communal consensus.
- The system’s definition of a “fit person” excludes unregulated kinship caregivers, who represent the primary care model in Ghana. This framing labels communal caregiving networks as informal and implicitly risky rather than recognizing them as an essential part of Ghana’s broader caregiving system.
- Ghanaian families face a structural “double bind” where the formal child protection system is seen as intrusive and stigmatizing. At the same time, traditional kinship networks carry no government-recognized legal authority, and it is this double bind itself, not a lack of resources, that remains the primary barrier to effective child protection.
In her analysis, Wilson was also struck by how Ghana’s child protective service policy documents clearly acknowledged their own cultural limitations and the need to integrate formal and informal systems. “The legislative framework of the Children’s Act works against the informal structures the policy aims to involve,” she explained. “It highlighted that the dissonance is not just a divide between law and culture but is also a gap within the formal system.”
Wilson proposes a hybrid governance model to close implementation gaps caused by cultural dissonance. This model operates across three interconnected levels. First, at the legislative level, she proposes revising the definition of a “fit person” to formally recognize extended caregivers within kinship networks, paired with kinship support packages that provide resources that still respect cultural caregiving norms.
At the community level, her model proposes expanding diversion provisions found in the Juvenile Justice Act to strengthen collaboration between social welfare officers and traditional authorities, so that minor disputes can be resolved through community-based processes. More serious cases would still be escalated and addressed by the formal system.
And finally, at the practitioner level, the model recommends training social workers and judicial officers in interpretive cultural competence, equipping these practitioners with the skills to engage families in culturally aligned language to build trust between families and child protective institutions.
“This article lays theoretical and interpretive groundwork I plan to expand on in various ways,” shared Wilson. She currently leads a systematic review team across multiple universities that is comparing culturally responsive and non-responsive child protection systems. This collaboration expands these discussions across multiple national contexts.
"The families this research described are my families," she explains. "The kinship networks these policies disregard are the same networks that shaped me. I watched them hold communities together in circumstances that formal systems could not reach. My research is motivated by the conviction that effective child protection cannot be imported; it must be co-created with the communities it is meant to serve. Child welfare systems should strengthen families, not replace them."