Tradition and Cultural Practices as a Catalyst for Change in Child Protection: A Documentary Case Study of the Kano State Child Protection Law
For two decades, cultural and religious objections stalled the domestication of Nigeria’s Child Rights Act (CRA) 2003 in Kano State, with critics arguing that the Act’s universal definition of childhood, its prohibition of child marriage, and its restrictions on customary discipline conflicted with Islamic jurisprudence and Hausa-Fulani traditions. This article challenges the assumption that tradition is inherently an obstacle to child protection. Using a qualitative documentary case study design, the study traces Kano’s legislative trajectory from the CRA’s enactment in 2003 to the passage of the Kano State Child Protection Law in June 2023, drawing on legislative records, executive statements, press archives, NGO and scholarly documentation, and supplementary interview material from a larger comparative study of the Lagos and Kano child protection systems. The analysis shows that domestication succeeded when the law was reframed through, rather than imposed upon, the state’s Islamic-legal and cultural environment: the 2021 executive decision to make the bill “reflect the position of Shari‘ah on each and every section” of the CRA converted two decades of normative opposition into religious ownership of child protection. The argument is sharpened by a within-case contrast: the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015, pursued in Kano without an equivalent adaptive process, remains undomesticated, leaving Kano the only Nigerian state without the law as of 2026. The article proposes a framework of Shari‘ah-Compliant Child Protection (SCCP), built on substantive equivalence, faith-integrated enforcement, internal critique of harmful practices, and gradualist reform, and argues that its underlying logic, working through cultural systems rather than against them, is transferable to Christian and indigenous religious contexts across Africa. The Kano case demonstrates that when legal frameworks are developed through traditional structures, cultural practices can transform from barriers into catalysts for sustainable child protection.
Keywords: child protection; Kano State; Child Rights Act; Islamic social work; legal pluralism; tradition; Shari‘ah; cultural competence; Nigeria
