Panel 70: How Necessity Begets Ingenuity - Youth-Specific Poverty and Innovative Livelihood Strategies
Panel organiser: Irit Eguavoen (Center for Development Research, Germany)
Contact: eguavoen@uni-bonn.de
| The ever-increasing proportion of youth in the total population of most African countries poses new questions for research and entails challenges for development cooperation. Existing relations, assigned roles and economic domains shift and change between generations. The social navigation of youth and young “adults without social adult status” and negotiations between the generations became focus of anthropological studies. But with regard to growing youth poverty (in Sub-Saharan Africa, 60.2 million people between 15-24 years live below the poverty line of U.S. $ 1 per day), it seems high time to also look empirically at youth-specific income and livelihood strategies. Young people are inventive when facing typical difficulties, such as lack of regulated access to natural resources, social adult networks and credit, as well as inherited poverty, the limited say on the community, unemployment or the lack of white collar jobs for which they have qualified for. Youth’s strategies in job-searching, networking and securing income can be unconventional and innovative, as well as socially unaccepted or illegal. The contributions of this panel will present empirical work on youth-specific strategies and modes of social navigation. |