Youth and jobs

Youth and job

Introduction: youth entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa

Introduction: youth entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Afric

Introduction. Safe and inclusive cities: contesting violence

Introduction. Safe and inclusive cities: contesting violenc

Youth employment in a globalising world

Young people in the global South are seeking employment opportunities in challenging economic and social environments. This paper provides an overview of current debates regarding youth employment, highlighting conceptualisations of youth and (un)employment, emerging youth employment trends and the nature of policies introduced to tackle youth (un)employment. It provides an overview of the six papers that make up this special issue and shows how highlighting the complexities and diversities of youth employment strategies in sub-Saharan Africa provides valuable lessons, both for enhancing current conceptualisations and theorisation of youth employment and in terms of related policy instruments

Expanding the scales and domains of (in)security: youth employment in urban Zambia

Most research on issues of (in)security has tended to have a military/safety angle and focus on global/national scales linked to spectacular events. This paper addresses the overlooked insecurity realities of urban dwellers in the global South through a focus on more persistent and enduring forms of employment insecurities among young people. Building on both quantitative and qualitative data collected in a low-income settlement in Lusaka, Zambia, we explore how young people perceive their employment situation and examine the practices they engage in when seeking ways of making a living. Through analysing their views and experiences we show how employment insecurity is influenced by processes operating at the body, local, national and global scales, and how employment insecurity is closely interconnected with insecurity in other domains of young people's lives including the household, housing and education. Although the youth unemployment situation is often viewed as a serious threat to human security, we show how the lack of stable employment in itself is a manifestation of insecurity

Migration, housing and attachment in urban gold mining settlements

Mining settlements are typically portrayed as either consisting of purpose-built housing constructed by mining companies to house their workers, or as temporary makeshift shelters built by miners working informally and inhabited by male migrants who live dangerously and develop little attachment to these places. This paper contributes to these debates on the social and material dynamics occurring in mining settlements, focussing on those with urban rather than rural characteristics, by highlighting how misconceived these archetypal portrayals are in the Ghanaian context. Drawing on qualitative data collected in three mining settlements, we explore who is moving to and living in the mining towns, who is building houses, and how attachments to place develop socio-temporally. Through doing so, the paper provides original insights on the heterogenous nature of mining settlements, which are found to be home to a wide range of people engaged in diverse activities. Mining settlements and their attendant social dynamics are shown to evolve in differing ways, depending on the type of mining taking place and the length of time the mines have been in operation. Significantly, we illustrate how contrary to popular understandings of incomers to mining settlements as nomadic opportunists, migrants often aspire to build their own houses and establish a family, which promotes their attachment to these settlements and their desire to remain. These insights further scholarship on the social and material configuration of mining settlements and feed into the revival of interest in small and intermediate urban settlements

Young entrepreneurs in the mobile telephony sector in Ghana: From necessities to aspirations

Despite increasing research interest in the mobile telephony sector, only a few studies have devoted attention to informal businesses in the sector. Using qualitative field data collected on young mobile telephony entrepreneurs in Accra, this paper argues that despite the businesses being ‘informal’, they cannot be dismissed as ‘necessity’ enterprises unworthy of support. On the contrary, many young entrepreneurs have aspirations which are influencing their desire to stay in business. The article thus questions the bifurcated nature of entrepreneurial motivations, using the burgeoning mobile telephony sector as a case study, and draws out implications for policy support for youth-run businesses in the informal sector generally

Transitions to adulthood among young entrepreneurs in the informal mobile telephony sector in Accra, Ghana

The rapid expansion of the mobile telephony sector in African countries has been accompanied by the establishment of a wide range of informal support businesses, mostly run by young people. Little is known, however, about the lived experiences of young entrepreneurs working in this rapidly changing, technologically-driven sector. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Accra, this paper explores young people's experiences of running informal businesses within the mobile telephony sector, including the sale of mobile phones and accessories, repair and technical support services, and the sale of airtime and mobile money services. Fateful and critical moments relating to personal and family events, as well as social networks and structural factors, are shown to mediate young entrepreneurs' chances of success in this new ‘niche' economic sub-sector. Despite the challenges they face, the paper illustrates how many of these young people have been able to achieve financial independence, afford rental accommodation, provide support for family members, and establish and sustain households. The mobile telephony sector is shown to be offering young people the opportunity to carve out a living, facilitate transitions into adulthood, and even enable some to move up the social ladder. By highlighting the agency of this group of young people, and for some their success in achieving the status of adulthood through their hard work and ingenuity, this study offers an important counter balance to images of young people in sub-Saharan Africa as being ‘stuck' or in ‘waithood'

Spatial and social transformations in a secondary city: the role of mobility in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana

Existing research on urban Ghana mainly focuses on processes occurring within the country’s major cities, thereby reproducing a trend within the social sciences to overlook the role of intermediate and secondary cities. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by exploring spatial and social transformations in Sekondi-Takoradi, one of Ghana’s secondary cities and the metropolitan area serving the region’s emerging rubber industries as well as the country’s oil and gas economy. Using qualitative interviews conducted with residents in five of the city’s neighbourhoods, and a modified version of Kaufmann’s typology of mobility, we examine migration into Sekondi-Takoradi, residential mobility within the city, and the daily mobility of the city’s residents. The paper highlights how these diverse forms of mobility interact with processes taking place both within and outside Sekondi-Takoradi, most notably influencing and being influenced by livelihood strategies. It is argued that the city and its hinterlands can best be envisaged as a mobile networked whole, rather than consisting of disconnected and compartmentalised locales. The paper thus contributes to broader debates on how mobility shapes urbanisation by providing new empirical data on events unfolding in Africa’s secondary cities, and extends existing research by providing a counter narrative to literature that examines the city and its surrounding rural areas separately

Bounded entrepreneurial vitality: the mixed embeddedness of female entrepreneurship

Despite the recent increased interest in female entrepreneurs, attention has tended to focus on dynamic individuals and generic incentives without considering the roles of gender and place in entrepreneurship. In this article, we draw on the notion of mixed embeddedness to explore how time-and-place–specific institutional contexts influence women’s entrepreneurship. Drawing on primary data collected in Ghana, where exceptionally more women engage in entrepreneurial activities than men, we examine the scale and characteristics of female entrepreneurial activity, exploring the factors that account for this strong participation of women, and examine whether this high entrepreneurial rate is also reflected in their performance and growth aspirations. The findings reveal a disjuncture between, on the one hand, the vibrant entrepreneurial endeavors of Ghanaian women and positive societal attitudes toward female entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, female business activities characterized by vulnerability and relatively low achievement. The article shows how regulatory, normative, and cultural–cognitive institutional forces, which have been transformed over time by local and global processes and their interaction, are concomitantly propelling and impeding women’s entrepreneurial activities. We propose that the study of female entrepreneurs within economic geography could be advanced by analyzing the differing effects of the complex, multiple, and shifting layers of institutional contexts in which they are embedded