ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a perspective on the difficult context of caregiving, showing how caregivers negotiate their day-to-day realities. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part presents the context of insecure livelihoods and food insecurity, showing how this affects caregiving in general and the caregiving experiences in particular. The second part explores the context of caregiving for widow caregivers, demonstrating how unequal gendered and other relations in the community that are attached to this identity influence the caregiving experience. The chapter also shows what I locate as zombie fatherhoods are part and parcel of cartographies of children's lived experience of vulnerability. While such challenging contexts portend difficulties in caregiving, they also act as a basis of creativity as caregivers design strategies to overcome them. By weaving these creative strategies into the arguments, the chapter reveals a need for action to intervene in these challenging caregiving contexts. It also shows that these strategies are part and parcel of cartographies of what it means to be a poor and vulnerable child in certain contexts.
