Reconceptualising temporality in young lives: exploring young people’s 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 ‘adults in the making’. Yet there is growing acknowledgement that young people, like older people, are always both ‘being and becoming’. 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 10–24 in two villages, one in southern Malawi and the other in the mountains of Lesotho. By theorising a temporal dimension to de Haan and Zoomers’ 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

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

‘Squeezing money out of a rock’: diverse economies of contemporary theatre in Ghana

Ghana has a vibrant theatre tradition, and yet making theatre in Ghana is complex and theatre artists must grapple with the challenges posed by a lack of state support, limited access to formal funding and theatre venues, and a precarious labour market. This paper employs the perspective of diverse economies to explore how theatre artists make theatre. Rather than privileging formal institutions, capitalist enterprises, and waged labour, the diverse economies perspective brings to the fore diversity in labour arrangements, transactions, funding, and livelihood activities. We explore how theatre artists in Tamale, the capital of the Northern Region, and Accra, the national capital, engage in a diverse array of income generating activities, use different forms of labour, blend formal and informal finance, and engage in a multitude of transactions – that is, deploy diverse economies – to make the kinds of theatre they want and to lead the kinds of lives they find valuable

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

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 participants’ 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 “Growth and Employment” 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

The relational and redistributive dynamics of mutual aid: implications of Afro-communitarian ethics for the study of creative work

Studies of non-standard, project-based forms of work prevalent in the creative industries have typically theorized the relational dynamics of work as a competitive process of social capital accumulation involving an individualistic, self-enterprising, zero-sum, and winner-takes-all struggle for favourable social network-positioning. Problematizing this prevailing conceptualization, our empirical case study draws on fifty in-depth interviews and two focus groups with creative workers in Ghana to show how relations of mutual aid, including elaborate efforts to live harmoniously with others, are intricately intertwined with economic practices of getting by and getting ahead. Our analysis abductively mobilizes insights from Afro-communitarian ethics to theorize the mutual aid we observed as a complex socio-economic practice of relational resource redistribution contingent on degrees of social proximity. In applying “a theory from the South” to foreground the role of moral obligations, social harmony, and hands-on practices of mutual aid in non-standard forms of work, we contribute a “decolonial critique” of relationality of relevance to scholars of creative work and business ethicists

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