64 research outputs found
Introduction: youth entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Africa
Introduction: youth entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan Afric
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
Reconceptualising temporality in young lives: exploring young peopleâs current and future livelihoods in AIDS-affected southern Africa
In recent years, anxieties have been expressed that the impacts of southern Africa's AIDS pandemic on young people today will damage their future livelihood prospects. Geographers have been remarkably reluctant to explore young people's future livelihoods, inspired by a concern to view young people as human beings, worthy of study in their own right rather than mere human becomings, of interest only as âadults in the makingâ. Yet there is growing acknowledgement that young people, like older people, are always both âbeing and becomingâ. The connections between current and future lives merit much greater attention, both because experiences and actions in childhood and youth undoubtedly shape the futures of individuals and wider society, but also because young people's thoughts and actions are so often geared to the future, and this future orientation shapes their present worlds. This paper reports on research that set out to explore links between the impacts of AIDS and young people's livelihood prospects. Intensive case study research was undertaken, combining participatory methods and life history interviews with young people aged 10â24 in two villages, one in southern Malawi and the other in the mountains of Lesotho. By theorising a temporal dimension to de Haan and Zoomersâ concept of livelihood trajectories, the paper focuses on the ways in which young people respond to both the immediate sustenance requirements of themselves and their households and their need to accrue assets for future livelihoods. Some young people's trajectories appear to be disturbed by the influence of AIDS, but with no systematic patterns. Beyond addressing empirical questions concerning the impacts of AIDS, the paper contributes to our understanding of how livelihoods are produced and to the conceptualisation of youth transitions as produced through the iteration of present and future
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-placeâspecific institutional contexts influence womenâs 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 culturalâcognitive institutional forces, which have been transformed over time by local and global processes and their interaction, are concomitantly propelling and impeding womenâs 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
Report from a workshop 6-8 September 2010
This working paper is a report from the workshop on Entrepreneurship Development arranged by the Centre for Business and Development Studies at CBS and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in September 2010. The objective of the workshop was to use the participantsâ joint knowledge and experiences to discuss and provide conclusions on what role entrepreneurship development has played and can play to stimulate growth and employment in Africa. Entrepreneurship development is understood as the promotion and development of activities and processes that foster and support productive entrepreneurship in the society. The workshop should provide inputs to how entrepreneurship in Africa can be supported and be used in the development and implementation of the âGrowth and Employmentâ priority of the new Danish strategy for development cooperation. The workshop had twenty participants with long standing insight to the challenges of entrepreneurship development and employment growth in Africa from international organizations, development cooperation partners, universities and private enterprises and organizations. The report contains the key issues discussed at the workshop and ends with conclusions and recommendations
Strategic Response under Market and Institutional Uncertainty in the Tanzanian Food Processing Industry
Infant industry structures, weak institutions, wide spread market failures and lack
of trust permeate the Tanzanian business environment. Nevertheless, some local enterprises
succeed in overcoming these challenges. This paper seeks to understand the strategies of
these enterprises. Drawing on case studies of Tanzanian enterprises in the food processing
industry, we identify six generic coping strategies which contrast markedly with the kind of
strategies conventional strategic management thinking would prescribe: Instead of focus
strategies, Tanzanian enterprises diversify across industries and value chain functions;
Instead of competitive strategies, Tanzanian enterprises embark on network and political
strategies; And instead of internationalizing based on home-market strengths, Tanzanian
enterprises internationalize in response to home-market weaknesses. We characterize the
strategies adopted by Tanzanian enterprises and discuss implications for the strategic
management literature
Moving young lives: Mobility, immobility and inter-generational tensions in urban Africa
A Social Negotiation of Hope: Male West African Youth, âWaithoodâ and the Pursuit of Social Becoming Through Football
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/This paper examines the present-day perception among boys and young men in
West Africa that migration through football offers a way to achieve social standing
and improve oneâs life chances. More specifically, we use the case of aspirant young
Ghanaian footballers as a lens to qualify recent conceptualizations of African youth,
such as âwaithoodâ, which have a tendency to overlook the multifarious attempts and
visions of young people on the continent to overcome social immobility. Drawing on
various and long-term ethnographic fieldwork among footballers in urban southern
Ghana between 2010 and 2016, we argue that young peopleâs efforts to make it
abroad and âbecome a somebodyâ through football is not merely an individual
fantasy; it is rather a social negotiation of hope. It is this collective practice among a
large cohort of young males â realistic or not â which qualifies conceptualizations of
youth transitions such as âwaithoodâ. By this, we highlight how examining the
contemporary fusion of sport with a desire to migrate furthers our understandings of
social mobility for West African youth, and extends literature on the strategies used
by young people in the region as they try to bypass the structural barriers blocking
their path to âbecoming a somebodyâ
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