Header photo credit: afhunta / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). View of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

Note: This article presents the views of the authors featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

AI statement: Microsoft Copilot was used to help produce a first draft of this summary blog post. This draft was then extensively edited by the communications team and approved by the author of the article.

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By Elizabeth Dessie; first published on URBANET.

In African cities, young people struggle with limited opportunities and systemic failures. How can cities overcome these barriers to secure their future?

Young people represent a demographic majority in most African cities. However, young people and their rights to equal, integrated and uninterrupted access to education, secure and decent work, healthcare and safety do not always represent a priority for the state.

Young people often play a pivotal role in political campaigns and are considered central in mobilising pre-electoral change-centred sentiment – but for the most part, many promises from political elites are left unmet, leaving young women and men to make do with the opportunities they create for themselves. This is particularly notable in cities, which manifest the possibilities that come with economic success, whilst simultaneously embodying the stark contrasts that exclusionary development produces.

Recently published research conducted by the youth and capability development domain at the African Cities Research Consortium draws on findings from five African cities – Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Freetown (Sierra Leone), Kampala (Uganda), Maiduguri (Nigeria) and Mogadishu (Somalia) – to better understand the challenges that young people face in their transitions into adulthood. Its findings are informed by a theoretical framework centred around a political settlement analysis.

The research has identified unemployment as the overarching concern urban youth face in their everyday lives. Many respondents point to a lack of commitment to meaningful, long-term solutions from the state as the underlying cause for their hardship. Alongside unemployment, they named a lack of quality and integrity of several crucial city systems – namely education, healthcare, transportation, finance, and law and order – hindrances to young people’s ability to move into adulthood with the required assets and resources.

The importance of multisectoral approaches

Whilst limited access to healthcare, low-quality education and other services mean that young people’s school-to-work transitions are impeded, findings from our research show that even in the presence of learning facilities and infrastructure appropriate for service provision, serious challenges remain.

“Overcrowded classrooms, low morality among the teachers, puny salaries for teaching and non-teaching staff, infrastructural deficiencies, and a collapse of governance at the school, district, and national level have all become part of this systemic failure.” 

– Key informant in Kampala

Cities like Freetown, Maiduguri, and Mogadishu advocate for non-governmental actors to play a part in addressing gaps in state-led service provision. However, the quality of services provided generally falls short, and access for the most underprivileged remains a luxury.

“TVET education is expensive, and this is a major challenge for young people who may have dropped out from formal schooling. TVET education should always be a ready option, but some of these courses are costly and that discourages many young people from enrolling.”

– Key informant in Freetown

Addressing the systemic failures of cities and their impacts on young people’s lives requires a multisectoral approach. This involves state institutions building partnerships with international and national non-governmental organisations (INGOs/NGOs), the private sector, and civil society in an effort to address the structural obstacles that obstruct young people’s ability to move forward in their lives. By drawing on the heterogeneity and leverage of a variety of stakeholders, multisectoral strategies may produce outcomes that result in more targeted, consistent, long-term improvements to the livelihood challenges that young people face.

Tackling inequality through political inclusion

In instances where young people do find work in the city, the pay they receive often does not stretch far enough to meet their basic living needs. This is particularly true amongst young women with children, who already face an array of challenges navigating labour market conditions.

“We are not even paid the cost of a single jacket we produce. I struggle a lot to cover my expenses. One day I had nothing to put in the lunch box for my son.”

– Factory employee in Addis Ababa

For young women and adolescent girls in particular, the need to get by in cities often leads to interrupted educational pathways which results in disenfranchising outcomes for their transitions towards adulthood. In Freetown and Maiduguri, unplanned pregnancies create conditions that force women and girls to drop out of school, with boys left to pursue their education uninterrupted by childcare responsibilities.

Moreover, urban public spaces were also identified as sites of pronounced insecurity for women and girls, whose everyday mobilities exposed them to the risk of being subjected to gender-based violence. The lack of incentive to integrate young women’s voices into formal politics means that the everyday challenges they face go unregistered.

“There are few women in political positions such as […] commissioner, but they hardly have a strong say on governance and even business. The men seem to have a stronghold and control nearly everything.”

– Civil servant in Maiduguri

While converting social norms can be particularly difficult to tackle, it is vital to recognise the political agency of youth in the design of more inclusive cities. If young people were afforded meaningful representation in formal politics, cities would be shaped by their authentic voices, challenges, concerns, and innovations. With time, such representations would build the potential to challenge disenfranchising configurations of power that cut across the social and political divide. As a result, this would dismantle social norms associated with gender – as well as other social categories of differentiation – and set the foundations for more inclusive cities for all.

Despite the many challenges faced by young people in African cities detaching them from linear transitions into adulthood, our research points to resourcefulness and a wealth of aspirations as some of the core assets that youth dispose of. It is vital to acknowledge youth in cities not solely as a demographic category, but most importantly as citizens who form an integral part of the social, political, and economic fabric of African societies of today and tomorrow.

This article is republished with permission from URBANET. Read the original article.

Photo credits: Sohadiszno / iStock. Young people at Addis Mercato in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the largest market in Africa.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

What have we learnt so far?

Building on ACRC’s conceptual framework, the database aims to bolster our evidence base about the key themes underpinning positive, meaningful urban transformation. Below we set out how some of the early initiatives we have documented are contributing to our understanding.

Many examples showcase the efforts of mobilised and organised citizens in designing and advancing solutions to urban problems. In spearheading participatory design and implementation and engaging with authorities, the simplified sewage system in Vingunguti, Dar es Salaam, illustrates the importance of including communities in the design and delivery of initiatives to improve their own settlements.

The Muungano Alliance’s Covid-19 response in Nairobi showcases a social movement making use of strong existing mobilisation and data capabilities to produce positive outcomes in times of crisis and uncertainty. The movement was able to sustain community networks, facilitate safety net support and achieve recognition by city officials of the value to crisis response of community-collected data and knowledge.

The case studies also describe the power of formal and informal reform coalitions in bridging the divide between citizens and the state, or creating the basis for institutional support. The partnership between the city council, federation of informal settlement residents, technical support NGO, international development funders and transnational learning networks was key to both the effectiveness of in-situ upgrading and affordable housing in Dzivarasekwa Extension, Harare, and its later scaling up through regulatory reform.

The success of the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) in Nairobi also derives from its ability to bring together individuals and institutions that have been working on tackling various urban challenges. 

Often, successful urban reform involves enhanced state capacity, strengthening local governance and accountability or addressing capacity limitations through partnership-led approaches. A technical and vocational education and training project in Freetown aimed to address rising irregular youth migration. The project designed an integrated, targeted approach to skills and capacity development. The process focused on ensuring that young people could benefit from the skills they were equipped with, fostering partnerships with the municipality and private sector to maximise long-term outcomes, as well as challenging gender norms around employment.

Elsewhere, the introduction of Gulper technology in Kampala required the support of government authorities recognising and encouraging innovative solutions that address the realities of sanitation service needs in the city’s informal and underserved settlements and markets. This included reconfiguring governance arrangements to remove administrative and bureaucratic obstacles.

A change in Lagos’ waste management policy – and the subsequent willingness of government authorities to engage with small-scale actors in waste management and recycling – provided the motivation for a collaboration between informal waste pickers and NGOs in forming the Association of Scraps and Waste Pickers of Lagos.

The important contribution of elite commitment to improved outcomes and tackling urban challenges is explored in many of the case studies. The Freetown property tax reform required progressive leadership with an ambitious agenda that needed funding, and could not have taken off without strong mayoral commitment and leadership. The initiative increased city revenue to finance development priorities like infrastructure and basic services. It also increased the transparency and efficiency of the city’s property tax system, allowing the council to build trust with taxpayers.

This is not always possible within the constraints of secondary research – for example, if monitoring and evaluation has not yet been carried out. In these cases, the assessment of a range of people who have been closely involved in the implementation of the project is considered to be the closest barometer for how well the project meets the needs of city residents.

Reframing transformative urban progress

ACRC’s theory of change allows us to reframe our understanding of the conditions required to enact transformative progress in African cities, exploring in particular the role of urban reform coalitions in catalysing some of these changes. In addressing complex challenges, reform coalitions that cut across private, public and third sector spheres – and that challenge the formal–informal binary that divides the social and economic spheres of urban life – allow for innovative solutions to come to life through new partnerships and collaborations driven by a shared cause.

As the ACRC programme moves into its implementation phase, the database of urban reform initiatives will boost its value as a learning tool – expanding our understanding of how the founding principles, theoretical positionality, design and approaches to implementation result in improved living conditions for the most vulnerable parts of urban society.

Header photo credit: Emma Kapicha / Unsplash. Overlooking Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Header photo credit: Rudolf Ernst / iStock. Women sorting and selling grains at Addis Mercato in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie

What makes urban life worth living? With cities across the world epitomising economic drivers of development and transformation, worth and value in relation to the urban have generally been conceptualised in monetary terms.

But how does liveability interact with the subjective needs and experiences of city dwellers, and to what extent is exclusion an inherent part of urban pathology under global capitalism? What do cities become if we depart from value as a monetary qualifier of worth? And what discoveries will we make if we integrate history and relationality in understandings of what cities are, and what being urban is?

This blog post ponders these questions in relation to presentations, discussions and interactions that took place at the “What makes urban life worth living? (Re)evaluating the value of urban life” workshop, hosted in May 2023 by Dinamia’CET  (ISCTE-IUL) and the Urban Transitions Hub (ICS-ULisboa) in Lisbon, Portugal.

The metaphysics of cities

Bringing together researchers from across the social sciences and beyond, the first part of the workshop was structured around participants’ presentations and keynote lectures that cut across themes and geographies. The papers presented consisted of exploratory pieces as well as developed projects and ideas. Sessions explored urban theory through critical perspectives, discussions around urban struggles for survival and change, and urban culture through explorations of public space as sites of contestation and conflict.

Central to these discussions was an interest in investigating the metaphysical characteristics of cities, starting with a deep-dive into the philosophical foundations of human settlements as intricately linked to economic activity and exchange. The discussions that followed revolved around the importance of understanding urban spaces through both a sociological and a political and economic lens, the need to problematise urban governance in relation to the state and policing, the centrality of cities in market systems, and the value of critically examining how exercising our inherent right to the city is often tied to consumerism as an impartial part of urban life.

Key issues raised during these sessions also included the role of the built environment in the production of public spaces, conceptual openings around moral values, moral economies, studying urban areas as sites of boredom, urban liveability under conditions of austerity, the relationship between cities and rural areas, and the role of art as a source of commonality and cultural expression across urban communities.

Neighbourhoods, surrounds and derivative futures

A micro-workshop plunged into the many themes covered in the first day’s discussions, structured around questions related to housing, markets and the state. Departing from a theoretical exploration of AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of the surrounds – defined as “urban spaces beyond control and capture that exist as a locus of rebellion and invention” – Irene Peano asked how extensions are challenged and recreated through research in cities. She explored how this process disrupts ideas of worth and value in relation to urban areas by rethinking notions of urban majorities, and infrastructures of vitality and resilience. Highlighting the importance of conceptual experimentation, Peano’s talk drew on examples from the global South and the global North – including her own research on migrant lives in Italy – to emphasise how identities are inhabited by individuals and communities in efforts to challenge racialised, gendered, heteronormative and broader frameworks of oppression.

The idea of the city as a site of struggle was also central to a talk by Simone Frangella. Exploring the territorialities of belonging, Frangella took workshop participants on a theoretical journey through postcoloniality in relation to the cultural production of certain neighbourhoods in Lisbon. She discussed her research on intergenerational mobility, the repatriation of colonial settlers to Portugal following independence, and how these movements across place and time produced specific residential patterns and cultural narratives. Introducing the concept of “homing” as a useful tool in understanding conviviality in relation to the history of the built environment in cities, Frangella explored the symbolism of place and memory in understanding the history – and the present – of marginalised neighbourhoods.

Building on notions of oppression and cultural production, Ana Rita Alves offered a deep-dive into her research on economically-driven and racialised forms of governmentality enforced by the Portuguese state. She described how tactics that legitimise household evictions are intimately linked to state violence and surveillance. Discussing rehousing initiatives that lead to abysmal losses of income generation and social capital, Alves highlighted housing insecurity as a deeply racialised experience of the city – resulting in lived realities that stand in contrast to housing as a basic human right, with residential segregation and generational patterns of dispossession.

A closing session led by Erik Bordeleau delved into the web of artificial intelligence and financial derivatives. Drawing on his research, Bordeleau emphasised the role of financial technology in redefining value as hard currency and liquidity. He highlighted new technological interventions and the ways in which fintech is redesigning how cities operate as financial nodes of the global capitalist system.

Urbanity as (non)normativity

In addressing the question at the heart of this workshop, many others were raised, opening new windows of enquiry about the value and worth of urban life, about cities and about whose lives and experiences of urbanity “count”. During a walk through Lisbon on the final day of the workshop – which included visits to underserviced and historically marginalised neighbourhoods both in the city centre and its peripheries – thoughts around the blurry lines between illegality and informality were shared. This led to reflections on the permanence of uncertainty, how being stuck in spaces of transition can turn into generational legacies, about the temporal and spatial linkages between urban interventions aimed at renewing and reviving urban areas, and precarity and marginalisation.

By demonetising, instead of devalorising, “worth” as a concept, we allow ourselves to understand the city outside of the extractive processes attached to the use of land, time and labour. Instead, we observe the urban as an ecosystem that experiences its own cycles of disintegration and renewal. This workshop allowed participants to explore the extent to which normativity is rooted in our understandings of what the city is and in what it should be – heightening our understanding of inequality and exclusion as inherent manifestations of being urban under a capitalist global structure.

There is no definitive answer to the question of what makes urban life worth living. But through the nuances of diverse disciplinary perspectives, we can better understand the production and reproduction of urban life as a collectively gained and claimed resource, that is (re)made through the everyday practices of urban dwellers – including those structurally driven to the margins.

Dinamia’CET and the Urban Transitions Hub’s international workshop, “What makes urban life work living? (Re)evaluating the value of urban life”, was held on 25–26 May 2023. The event was hosted at ISCTE-IUL and the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences and organised by Andrea Pavoni (ISCTE) and Lavínia Pereira (ICS).

Header photo credit: Elizabeth Dessie. Graffiti artwork in the neighbourhood of Marvila in Lisbon, Portugal.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Patience Adzande conducts a focus group discussion in Maiduguri, Nigeria, as part of her fieldwork.

The difficulties of drawing the line between us and our informants also relate to the aftermath of data collection, through the resonance and impact of various life stories. Critical safeguarding issues arise here, particularly where the research undertaking is liable to potentially generate backlash for the research participants. The challenges posed by research – outside of our responsibility to “do no harm” – also concern our ability to deal with the nature of information shared with us and to process the stark differences defining our lives and those of our study subjects, as individuals and communities. While this may be more pronounced when working with people who are particularly disadvantaged economically, the weight of sitting through accounts of trauma related to war, displacement or gender-based violence is equally impactful.

It is therefore essential for researchers to recognise and declare their commitment to taking all necessary steps to prevent harm from resulting to their research participants. In addition, the potential impact of the research process on the researcher, especially during and after data collection, should be adequately considered. Researchers must give these issues adequate forethought before engaging in their research undertakings and make ethical decisions on how or whether to conduct their proposed research.

Navigating issues associated with researching disadvantaged people

While there are no definitive answers to the issues raised here – or to the many other questions left unaddressed – it is important to acknowledge their existence and engage with the persistent presence of discomfort that surrounds the data collection process. One way of navigating this discomfort is to approach research subjects as “human lives” and not just data, and to design methodologies around exchange rather than extraction. This may be instinctively done by conducting interviews and FGDs as reciprocal conversations, while maintaining boundaries and recognising the power configurations that shape our positionality in relation to informants and the knowledge and experiences they share.

Building on the need to integrate reciprocity into the process, another approach could be to engage in more participatory research. This would also require validation sessions with study participants through follow-up fieldwork. Sharing research findings with individuals and communities – in a language accessible to them – would allow them an insight into the research process beyond the interview and FGD setting. It would also enable them to observe how raw data is processed through sharing findings via presentations and publishable outputs.

Takeaway insights and lessons learnt

Regardless of the particular strategies we chose in navigating the intricacies of research with and on disadvantaged peoples, honesty and transparency are central in ensuring that our roles are clearly defined and that informants’ have realistic expectations of us. Through building authenticity into our interactions with informants, we may become better equipped at setting targets that acknowledge the lengthy journey to impact through publications. At the same time, we can challenge the normative nature of research as extraction, by critically reflecting on our relationship with our research participants and adopting more inclusive approaches to data collection.

This blog post is a joint output based on discussions that took place as part of a seminar the authors attended on 31 January 2023, at The University of Manchester, entitled “Doing research with and on disadvantaged peoples”.

Photo credits: Patience Adzande, taken on fieldwork in Maiduguri, Nigeria, August 2022.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

“Our supplies disappeared and when they were back, the price went up by more than double. That was the end of it. Now I pay for my life here by selling socks, but I don’t let that dismay me. I remain focused on my plans of transforming my life here, and once things improve I will start saving for my own metalwork shop.”

The testimonies of Tizita and Fikadu form part of a longitudinal qualitative research project that maps the livelihood strategies of a sample of migrant youth in Addis Ababa at two points in time between 2018 and 2022. Drawing on these findings, this blog outlines some of the ways in which rural–urban migrant youth between the ages of 15-27 experience and counteract pressure. Through an exploration of migrants’ everyday strategies of navigating the city, findings presented here show how dealing with the intricacies of urban life relates intimately to the lives rural youth left behind and the imaginary futures they aspire towards, the ways in which youth relate to the social and economic responsibilities they carry, and the manner in which subjective pressure experienced by women and men has a compounding effect that further exacerbates the challenges migrant youth face.

“Surviving” the post-pandemic city

The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and the strain of the internal conflict that has embroiled Ethiopia since late 2020 have worsened the quality of life for low-income urban dwellers living and working in Addis Ababa. With data drawn from a national labour and migration survey pointing to steadily rising rates of rural–urban migration in the Horn of Africa nation, for many rural youth, including those who form part of this research, migrating to the capital represented an extension of a broader household livelihood strategy in the face of income and food insecurity and an absence of employment opportunities outside of farm work, with many embarking on migration with the expectation of long-term economic gains.

For young rural women and girls who drop out of school, moving to Addis Ababa is associated with prospects of completing their education. Tizita’s parents paid a broker to take the young girl to the city where, as she was told, Tizita would earn her rent through “light work in a family house” while enrolled in school and focused on reclaiming the classes she needed to transform her life through an education. In reality, life in the city turned out to be far from what was promised and what the young woman had expected. After passing through several houses, becoming a parent through an unplanned pregnancy and transitioning into commercial sex work, Tizita described the impossibility of returning to her native village “empty handed”.

Tizita’s experience of life in Addis Ababa is different to that of rural men like Fikadu. Having moved to the city to join his brother at the age of 20 to work at a repairs shop, Fikadu’s absorption into the urban economy took place under the guidance of familial ties in the city, enabling the young man to build up assets through developing his human and social capital from his arrival. Although Fikadu’s relationship with his boss became strained with time, leading to him losing his job, as the young man described, “facing difficulty in a new place is easier when you have family there, or friends who become your family”. Nevertheless, similarly to Tizita, Fikadu does not contemplate on returning to his place of origin permanently, much less before due evidence of having arrived, seen and conquered the city through palpable economic returns.

Addis Ababa was not subjected to a hard lockdown, similar to those imposed elsewhere across metropoles throughout the continent in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet consistent government advice on social distancing and reports of rising Covid-19 cases covered in the media daily meant informal workers experienced a steep decline in earnings, transforming the daily hustle for money for food, clothes, medication, and a mattress space to rent for the night, into the Labours of Hercules. As was described by informants in 2022, the economies of everyday life had become particularly difficult when compared to the cost of life in the city as when we first met in 2018: “This isn’t even life from hand to mouth. This is surviving and making it to tomorrow. I cannot give what I do not have” (Markos, 21-year-old man, street hawker).

For migrant youth, the pressure of “surviving” the city was rooted in the inability of returning to the rural area and the necessity of succeeding in their migration project. Both these factors were particularly pronounced among young women who had become mothers during their time living in Addis Ababa, as was the case for Tizita, and those who earned a living through sex work, who described the impossibility of re-integrating into rural life having been “changed” by the city. The need to pool money to buy leftover food from restaurants, eating once a day, or skipping meals all together in order to buy medication to ease a toddler’s pain, meant that when migrant youth received word from their families in the rural areas, they stayed silent knowing they are unable to send the money their mothers, fathers and siblings are waiting for.

Moreover, although sex workers were the highest earners among interviewed youth both in 2018 and 2022 – with others engaged in street vending, street hawking and begging respectively – the ways in which streetwalkers related to their work as a temporary strategy highlighted the agency migrant women sourced from to navigate their household economies, in the absence of other employment opportunities or support frameworks to lean on, with a focus on the future: “It’s a life of trial here for a mother, and this work cannot give you peace or calm sleep. But it is only for the time being, I will stop this work as soon as I have some money saved” (Worknesh, 19-year-old woman, streetwalker).

“Living through” future imaginaries

Throughout their lives in Addis Ababa and both prior to and after the pandemic, migrant youth attributed a particular importance to their future aspirations, demonstrated in how youth navigate the challenges they face in the city and why they stay. As touched on in the introduction to this blog, these aspirations reflected gendered experiences of the city, compounded by the inability of migrant women to source from the full range of benefits attached to social capital – namely in developing their asset bases – in comparison to their male counterparts. Devising coping strategies and approaches to realising their aspirations, drawing on resources youth possess and based on a combination of testimonies of success stories, collective beliefs about the best possible option – and ideas of what may or may not be a feasible way forward – entrepreneurship was the goal for men like Fikadu, while for women like Tizita, migration abroad was identified as the sole gateway to a better future.

As theoretical advances concerned with the production of aspirations suggest, such ideas about what is possible and for whom do not appear in a vacuum, and are a product of collective orientations towards a desired future drawn from specific geographies, histories and norms. Nevertheless, the path to realising aspirations for migrants – particularly young women with children, who relied solely on their labour for self-sustenance, while leaning on the support of their peers with similar asset portfolios, economic capacities and vulnerabilities as them – showed to be paved with stumbling blocks due to the structural contexts they emerge from. Respondents described forming savings groups – namely in the form of iqub ROSCA schemes, which carried a significant degree of social importance – designed to facilitate access to informal finance in the absence of access to formal banking institutions. Yet having the means to participate in collective micro-financial schemes meant that borrowing money became part of a balancing act between making ends meet and living under crippling debt. This was particularly the case for youth under pressure to send remittances to their rural families of origin.

While only a small fraction of respondents attested to sending remittances to their rural families during interviews conducted in 2018, during fieldwork conducted in 2022, respondents described lending and borrowing practices for the purpose of sending money home regardless of their circumstance, explaining that life in the rural areas had not improved either. For women who begged for a living but who had previously worked as street traders, defaulting on loans from fellow traders, neighbourhood shop owners and suppliers was described as the reason why they were unable to maintain their income-earning strategies and why the social networks that sustained their work had disintegrated.

For those who described shrinking earnings in the weeks preceding our interviews, avoiding certain people and areas of the neighbourhood had become the norm in an effort to save themselves from extorsion, while others described moving to other neighbourhoods entirely. For migrant men, many of whom associated the importance of economic transformation with the prospects of marriage and a family of their own, existing debt was deepened by involvement in what respondents referred to as “bad habits”, introduced by youth who they described had “allowed the city to get the best of them”. These habits consisted of substance abuse – namely drinking, smoking and chewing khat – as well as sports and lottery betting and, in some cases, experimenting with prescription medication: “With all the bad things that surround us here, I say it is fine to live through this and rejoice when things are better.” (Yohannes, 27-year-old man, street vendor).

“In their efforts to confront the pressures of everyday urban life, characterised largely by waiting for a break or opportunity, the strategies youth devise to break out of these cycles of waiting carry their own weight and risk worsening their lives while on hold.”

As such, the mounting nature of pressure as a product of aspirational strategies compounds the existing strain of meeting everyday economic obligations attaching to living in a post-pandemic Addis Ababa for migrant youth. While describing the pace of life as one lived “slowly by slowly” (one day at a time), the days youth spend in the city are explicitly future-orientated, turning aspirations and the realisation of desired futures into the reason why the city is endured.

For migrant youth, the pressure of “surviving” and “living through” the city then becomes a layered experience. In their efforts to confront the pressures of everyday urban life, characterised largely by waiting for a break or opportunity, the strategies youth devise to break out of these cycles of waiting carry their own weight and risk worsening their lives while on hold. For Tizita and Fikadu, these layers of pressure are subjective in essence and, as such, embodiments of the gendered experience of the social and economic fabric of the urban. As outlined in other blogs in this series, the prospects of an alternative conceptualisation of everyday lived realities of subjective pressure offer new insights into the ways in which urban dwellers in post-pandemic societies throughout Africa navigate the economic strain of mounting responsibilities, social expectations and gendered inequalities in living, planning and aspiring.

This article is adapted from a version that originally appeared on the Developing Economics blog.

Header photo credit: Taylor Flowe / Unsplash. Woman grinding coffee beans, Ethiopia.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Maiduguri, Nigeria

In Maiduguri too, young people are largely excluded from decisionmaking processes in formal and traditional institutions, which are both dominated by elderly people. The increasing popularity of social media among young people has brought new spaces for youth political participation, with the elderly political class frequently appointing media-savvy youth as social media “aides”. Even in this digital space, however, this participation as media aides is used in a political manner detrimental to young people. Activists criticise these aides being used as politicians’ “social media attack dogs” and compare it to politicians who recruit young people as thugs to harass opponents, steal ballot boxes and commit violence during elections. Outside of formal governance institutions and structures, many Maiduguri youth actively participate in community development through youth-led organisations and informal neighbourhood clusters.

As in Freetown, many young people have complained that government jobs and programmes seeking to empower or educate young people primarily benefit people close to politicians rather than reaching “deserving” young people. The focus of international NGOs on displaced female youth and former Boko Haram members means that the large numbers of unemployed and vulnerable male youth in host communities are overlooked. Dissatisfaction with the government, and the desperation to succeed, leads some unemployed youth to join the Boko Haram insurgency that has caused significant damage to school infrastructure and loss of human resources across the city and state. A high representation of young people, and young men in particular, among Boko Haram members also fuels the problem of widespread dragnet arrests, extortion and intimidation of youth by security agents. The insurgency has also resulted in the influx of thousands of displaced people into the city, forcing many young people to live in overcrowded conditions and face high levels of unemployment.

Here young people are not suffering only from the social and economic stresses that characterise young lives in many urban areas across the continent. Many have also experienced significant trauma in their experiences of the Boko Haram insurgency that influences all aspects of their lives, including their education, job prospects, family and peer relationships, and their sense of worth. Here, too, this has led some to use drugs and other illegal substances to cope with their trauma and circumstances, or to engage in gang violence and steal.

Mogadishu, Somalia

As a city that has experienced prolonged conflict and that is still dealing with combatting the violent extremist group al-Shabaab, Mogadishu’s young people face some strikingly similar challenges to those we saw across Maiduguri and Freetown. Mogadishu and Somalia’s political settlement leads to some unique manifestations of youth exclusion in the city. This surrounds both Somalia’s 4.5 clan power-sharing system (which allocates resources and opportunities along clan-affiliated lines) and issues surrounding the status of Mogadishu as the capital city, but with the Benadir region it is located within the only Somali region without representation in the Upper House of Parliament. There is a lack of youth political representation and implementation of youth-focused policies.

That Mogadishu is home to the largest number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the country means that its youth face critical challenges centred around high unemployment and underemployment. The collapse of state educational systems has limited young people’s access to education and the quality of that which is available. There are only a limited number of Technical, Vocational, Education and Training (TVET) centres and programmes to help equip young people with skills. Alongside education, the privatisation of the healthcare systems renders most healthcare poor quality, expensive and out of reach for many young people. Across many indicators and outcomes, young women are particularly vulnerable.

Similar to Freetown and Maiduguri, our research revealed a growing phenomenon of youth gangs across the city, which has damaging repercussions not only in terms of crime and violence, but also for the stereotypes of young people. This negatively influences the security and mobility of young people in the city. Growing drug use among young people was also highlighted regularly across our research as a relatively new phenomenon. Another coping strategy was a prevalence of forced internal and external migration of young people, called tahriib. Many young people and their families fleeing insecurity, drought, flooding and extortion from al-Shabaab move to other cities in the country. Young people, mostly men, embark on tahriib, a type of illicit transnational migration that often involves crossing many borders. In search of better opportunities, some take boats from Libya trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea with hopes of reaching Europe, where many youth lose their lives or go missing.

Conclusions

The parallels across the cities are quite astonishing – and were reflected in other presentations within the broader Youth, cities and dreams of ‘recovery’ panel. For young people in Freetown, Maiduguri and Mogadishu, the situation remains rooted in crisis, with “dreams of recovery” hard to envision. The scale and urgency of the employment crisis for young people is founded in the inability of educational systems to provide them with skills and capabilities to access employment, but also in labour markets that are unable to absorb large youth populations. Preliminary findings presented from our focus cities also highlight gender as a crosscutting theme that shapes the challenges young people face and their ability to recover from crises, with women faring worse in accessing education and employment, in claiming political representation and in dealing with multi-layered uncertainty.

Discussions within the panel highlighted the tendency for people to refer to the importance of youth resilience, and their ability to individually and collectively “bounce back” from crisis. But for young people in contexts with a history of and/or ongoing violence, we have to question this rhetoric.

Our research highlights that there may be some “coping strategies” that young people utilise to network, search for multiple income-generating opportunities, or turn to illegal means to make ends meet. But we have to recognise that these are contexts in which dreams of recovery are not met, but deferred. And it is in this space that we see new and increasing problems of young people’s widespread engagement in drug and alcohol abuse and severe mental health burdens that remain largely unaddressed.

A youth crisis in unemployment is deepening into new crises of mental and physical health and wellbeing in Freetown, Maiduguri and Mogadishu.

Header photo credit: Social Income / Unsplash. Market scene in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

Reimagining: The essence of UTA-Do

Across the breadth and depth of the workshop sessions, unique in their format as well as content, arguably the most powerful of these was a visit to the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). The visit included presentations and an overview of the movement’s history, covering events from the Centre’s creation to the police executions of local residents in response to supposed criminal activity in the Mathare settlement, with many unemployed youth becoming subjects of extra judiciary killings by state authorities.

Starting by documenting these crimes, the MSJC’s activity grew to incorporate various forms of resistance, including the Mathare Green Movement, which consisted of planting trees for victims of police crimes in the settlement, as well as a MSJC Kids Club, where children are mentored and schooled through fun activities designed to build their confidence and creativity. Other initiatives include the Matigari book club and Until Everyone is Free, a podcast series that uses the life and work of Kenyan freedom fighter, Pio Gama Pinto, to reflect on present realities and politics in Nairobi.

Equally inspiring and tuned to a similar tone of resistance, the Sound of Nairobi workshop session offered an alternative perspective to experiencing the city through the arts. Sound of Nairobi is an open access online archive, collection and portal of sounds from the city. The platform offers users an opportunity to upload their own sounds and listen to others in the portal, inviting them to consider how everyday audible experiences often go unnoticed, despite forming the essence of our city experiences. The portal draws people closer towards sounds that are often unheard, including silence as well as sound, considering how the city is shaped through sound and how different aspects of city life produce difference audible experiences. Ultimately, Sound of Nairobi functions as a living repository of urban sound, uplifting everyday experiences and voices through the arts in an alternative and inspiring way.

Workshop participants were also treated to an evening pre-screening of Kamirithu, a film documentation and history of the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Centre – an open-air theatre in Limuru that was established by workers and residents fromKamiruthu village. The Kamirithu theatre is best known as the site where Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s critical play, Ngaahika Ndenda (“I will marry when I want”), was written, directed and initially performed in 1977. The play was subsequently halted by the then government, the centre banned from holding gatherings and events, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o arrested and detained. Kamirithu is narrated by original cast members, and centres on the establishment of the centre, the production and subsequent banning of the play, and the ultimate destruction in 1982 of the facility by authorities at the time.

The cast members share reflections on their own lives, presenting multifaceted pathways through which they came to use drama and music to protest and highlight challenges in their village, relating to land, dispossession, industrial environmental pollution and oppressive work environments. Framed against the play, these life histories offer a rich and nuanced reflection, not just of Kamirithu and Limuru town, but of Kenya’s complex histories of land and dispossession that continue to date. In this way, Kamirithu provided UTA-Do participants a view of how history also provided forms of activism – through drama, music and creative arts – that could be connected to new social justice centres that were organising to contest similar issues.

Offering another alternative perspective on how to think of the city was a contribution by Carl Nightingale, associate professor of urban and world history at the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo. Situating cities within the discussion on the Anthropocene, Carl joined the workshop in a hybrid session to present his book, Earthopolis. Carl covered the history of urbanisation of the world through perspectives on planetary urbanisation and discussed his ideas around realms of action, habitat, impact and consequence.

As the UTA-Do workshop drew to a close, with a celebratory dinner and party held in Nairobi and hosted by Sound of Nairobi, many of us shared our enthusiasm over the event itself, the inspiration we gained from the interactive sessions, lectures and talks, as well as our excitement about the potential of future collaborations and engagements with attendees near and far.

In the midst of exploring the challenges of doing as well as undoing, reimagining and unlearning, most of us found that in order to claim new perspectives and ways of thinking, old frameworks and narratives must be dismantled. Looking forward, this event set a precedent for future workshops that will undoubtedly be equally thought-provoking and inspiring in addressing the essence of UTA-Do.

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

Remaking the city from the margins

In addition to workshops and contributions focused on the materiality of development trajectories in African cities, the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop also included presentations that unpacked experiences of marginalisation – shedding light on subjective ways of reimagining the city, many of which remain peripheral within the field of urban studies.

Echoing some of the central theoretical considerations raised by Jethron Ayumbah on the various forms of UTA-Do, Sabatho Nyamsenda, a political scientist and lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, presented research on local and community-driven approaches to resistance in Dar es Salaam. Sabatho presented his research on labour informality in Tanzania, relating this to economic theories and framing of informal workers as entrepreneurs. Echoing back to Hernando de Soto’s conceptualisations of dead capital, Sabatho presented how informal workers in the UWAMATA Bus Drivers Association, the women of Manzese, and BodaBoda taxi drivers throughout urban Tanzania challenged the insecure working conditions they experienced in the face of formalisation.

A shared discussion on queering the city was led by Keguro Macharia, an independent scholar from Nairobi, and Eddie Ombagi, postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. They extended the conversation around marginalised urban experiences. This complementary exchange covered historical and contemporary questions of queer urban subjectivities, and the intersections of gender and sexuality in the African city.

Referencing the city of Nairobi, Keguro proposed imagining the city through an abolitionist framework, where city dwellers are not policed but, rather, are allowed to enjoy and own the city as theirs. He provoked attendees to explore a thought process through which the city was viewed less as a space or mode of production, and more as a place continually in the process of becoming for all its residents. Similarly, in his description of Nairobi as a shot of whisky, Eddie underscored the value of temporality in the making and re-making of the city. Through this lens, time, change and continuous transformation become central elements in understanding queer urban lives in a context of social progress and movement towards inclusion and equality.

A hybrid lecture delivered jointly by Willie J. Wright, assistant professor at the University of Florida, and Adam Bledsoe, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, resonated with notions of reimagining the city from the margins, specifically through the lens of Black geographies. Introducing the origins of Black geography as a theoretical discourse emerging out of Black studies, Willie and Adam described race as a social and economic indicator located at the heart of how cities are experienced in the USA as sites of structural inequality. By challenging mainstream perspectives that dominate the discipline of geography, they highlighted the universality of Black geography to the experiences of black people everywhere. They also emphasised how a focus on Black experiences of education, housing and labour in the city exposes spatial dimensions of injustice otherwise unaccounted for. 

Revisiting the themes of defiance and transgression, a hybrid lecture from Gautam Bhan offered an elaborate understanding of the relationship between knowledge and activism. Gautam’s reflections on his experiences in Delhi resonated well with insights earlier shared by Jethron on the possibilities of collective action and antagonistic urban formations. Drawing attention to instances when the political becomes technical, Gautam reminded participants that in our roles as urban scholars, we should treat research as a political process.

Gautam led participants through the Indian Institute for Human Settlements’ experiences with what he termed the “demystification of the technical”, surmising the role of the scholar-activist as: bridging the political and the technical; engaging in the long durée of knowledge production which offers new language to the marginalised; producing research in alternative non-academic platforms; producing public archives; and challenging our own locations as scholar-activists. His counsel was for participants to be always conscious of the risk of depoliticising processes that are intrinsically political. This, he argued, can be done by always knowing when one is being used to shut the politics out and by a refusal to legitimise processes that seek to displace the political.

Adrian Wilson and Mario Schmidt put a spotlight on Nairobi as a place for scientific and political experiments, while noting the ethical problems that emerge from this. They observed the increased intrusion of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) into the cityscape to correspond with the turn towards evidence-based development aid. Identifying Nairobi as a key locus for these experiments, Adrian and Mario pointed out that Nairobians participate in RCTs and behavioural experiments which benefit mostly western scholars and local elites, while subjecting participants to substantial risks. They reminded participants of the heated debate that emerged following the publication of a paper by four economists, which was based on an RCT involving the disconnection of water services for inhabitants of Kayole in Nairobi over non-payment of water bills. According to Adrian and Mario, although many of these studies are presented as unproblematic, they often raise serious ethical questions and have damaging outcomes for the subjects.

Writing the African city

With plenty of opportunities to engage with fellow participants during the workshop, a number of sessions were designed specifically to bolster the budding skillsets of early career researchers in the room. Academic and non-academic participants were encouraged, through interactive and practical sessions, to reflect on how we could write the African city from diverse and multiple positionalities. In an interactive lecture, Amollo Ambole, a design researcher and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, shared her career path and journey as inspiration for participants to identify their own milestones and aspirations and to develop their own mission statements. Through this exercise, we were encouraged to understand our own journeys, strengths, accomplishments and trajectories as positionalities from which we could frame and shape our work, and direct our objectives and ambitions forward.

This self-reflective session was complemented by a working group activity led by Wangui Kimari on the diversity of methods used in studying the city. The session began by encouraging us to consider our positionality and the power dynamics that characterise our research context and relations. Using this, Wangui underlined how theory and positionality shape the ways in which data is collected, the particularities in the data that we concentrate on, and the importance of triangulating methods as a way of validating our research. Participants were then asked to identify unique methodological tools and approaches to research, and groups identified a range of tools, including group video analysis, sketch analysis and participant diaries. Attention was also given to the value of participatory action research and street phenomenology – or walking interviews – in underlining the relational nature of place in urban spaces, alongside other methods generally deemed conventional. This links back to the importance of collecting data in a non-extractive way – a key point raised by Jethron in his keynote lecture at the start of the workshop, who noted that “Africa needs to be treated as a source of knowledge, not as a source of data”.

Peter Ngau, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Nairobi, also contributed to this discussion on research methodologies. Sharing his experiences of being an urban practitioner and activist, he also acknowledged the importance of publishing as part of an academic’s career trajectory. Similarly, Mary Lawhon, senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Edinburgh, gave a lecture on navigating the intricacies of writing journal articles and getting published. Mary shared experiences on the challenges and rewards of academic writing and offered valuable tips on framing, and claiming, specific theoretical discussions when designing academic papers. Workshop participants were also offered an opportunity to apply for a number of grants offered by the generous funders who made the UTA-Do Workshop possible (listed below). 

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.