CHILD-FOCUSED non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa often use international policy guidelines in their efforts to protect children. They also depend on international donors to fund their activities. guest column:Sampson Addo Yeboah NGOs rely on standardised childhood policy frameworks, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Little attention is given to indigenous knowledge on childhood and its inclusion in child-focused interventions. We conducted a study to explore the interplay between these two worlds. The study, using an ethnographic method of participant observation and interviews, explored indigenous knowledge on child protection in a rural cocoa growing community of Ghana. We explored rural parents’ attitudes to an NGO intervention on children’s rights to basic schooling and the illegality of child labour. We focused mainly on the effects of indigenous knowledge on the outcomes of a child-rights based intervention; and interactions between parents and staff of a child-focused NGO. Using ethnographic methods enabled us to capture insights behind practices on rural childhood which would have been impossible with a quantitative approach. Findings from the study shows that parents perspectives on child protection were fundamentally different from those promoted by NGO frontline workers and the UNCRC. Rural parents viewed child protection as providing for the physical wellbeing of children and making sure they were trained in the norms and customs of the community. Based on our findings we recommended that for sustainable child protection interventions in rural Africa, child-focused NGOs working in these settings should meaningfully include local knowledge on childhood in their intervention programmes. This may ensure long-term local ownership by rural stakeholders and sustainability of the intervention. The history The idea of a “normative child” only came into being in Western Europe between the 17th and 19th century. During this period, childhood was constructed as a distinct phase of life separate from adulthood and children were seen as needing an enabling environment to play, receive formal education and to be free from work. Today these constructs are the embodiment of childhood in Western countries and are enshrined in documents such as the UNCRC which has become the conveying instrument of this approach. Organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and United Kingdom and US aid bodies work mostly with countries that have ratified the UNCRC. In most African countries, too, the legal construction of what a proper childhood should be is guided by the UNCRC. But, as realised in our study, traditional African childhoods differ from the child-rights based on UNCRC. The organisation and coherence of African childhoods are usefully oriented toward different contextual purposes to those reflected in the UNCRC approach. In traditional African societies, children get to know the ways of their community through family traditions. They work alon