Through international agencies and non-governmental organisations building their work on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, childhood has become increasingly homogenised as an idea. A ‘global model’ of childhood is promoted all over the world, but this is a model who fails in recognising the diverse realities of children’s lives. The diversity of childhood is on the other hand demonstrated through a growing body of literature on local childhood experiences, also in the majority world. Children living in opposition to the global model of childhood are here given predominantly attention, presenting children in especially difficult circumstances, in correspondence with most of media and NGO’s representations of children’s lives in the majority world. The experiences of the ‘ordinary’ lives of children in this part of the world are however underrepresented in literature, as well as in media.

Drawing on empirical research with 21 children in the age from eight to thirteen, representing diverse socio-economical backgrounds, this thesis provides a qualitative analysis of the experiences and perceptions of childhood in Bagamoyo, a coastal area of Tanzania. Along with the search for local experiences and perceptions, this study aims at providing a contribution to the knowledge about children’s lives located in the interstice between global ideas of childhood and lived realities of childhood in the majority world. I intend to give a broader picture of African childhood, reducing the gap between the two contrasts referred to above.