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Stuck
Young people are transforming the global landscape. As the human population today is younger and more urban than ever before, prospects for achieving adulthood dwindle while urban migration soars. Devastated by genocide, hailed as a spectacular success, and critiqued for its human rights record, the Central African nation of Rwanda provides a compelling setting for grasping new challenges to the world's youth.
Spotlighting failed masculinity, urban desperation, and forceful governance, Marc Sommers tells the dramatic story of young Rwandans who are \"stuck,\" striving against near-impossible odds to become adults. In Rwandan culture, female youth must wait, often in vain, for male youth to build a house before they can marry. Only then can male and female youth gain acceptance as adults. However, Rwanda's severe housing crisis means that most male youth are on a treadmill toward failure, unable to build their house yet having no choice but to try. What follows is too often tragic. Rural youth face a future as failed adults, while many who migrate to the capital fail to secure a stable life and turn fatalistic about contracting HIV/AIDS.
Featuring insightful interviews with youth, adults, and government officials,Stucktells the story of an ambitious, controlling government trying to govern an exceptionally young and poor population in a densely populated and rapidly urbanizing country. This pioneering book sheds new light on the struggle to come of age and suggests new pathways toward the attainment of security, development, and coexistence in Africa and beyond.
Published in association with the United States Institute of Peace
eBook
Governance, Security and Culture: Assessing Africa’s Youth Bulge
Although Africa has a youth-dominated population, African government policies are often not youth-centered and African governments and their international supporters are frequently under-informed about the priorities of most youth. Reliance on the “youth bulge and instability thesis” leads to distorted assessments of everyday realities. Examination of the lives, priorities, and cultural contexts of African youth, and the cases of youth in Rwanda and Burundi in particular, shows that the nature of relations between the state and massive populations of young, marginalized, and alienated citizens directly impacts the governance, security, and development prospects of African nations.
Journal Article
Governance, Security and Culture: Assessing Africa's Youth Bulge
Although Africa has a youth-dominated population, African government policies are often not youth-centered and African governments and their international supporters are frequently under-informed about the priorities of most youth. Reliance on the \"youth bulge and instability thesis\" leads to distorted assessments of everyday realities. Examination of the lives, priorities, and cultural contexts of African youth, and the cases of youth in Rwanda and Burundi in particular, shows that the nature of relations between the state and massive populations of young, marginalized, and alienated citizens directly impacts the governance, security, and development prospects of African nations. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
The Outcast Majority
The Outcast Majorityinvites policymakers, practitioners, academics, students, and others to think about three commanding contemporary issues-war, development, and youth-in new ways. The starting point is the following irony: while African youth are demographically dominant, most see themselves as members of an outcast minority. The irony directly informs young people's lives in war-affected Africa, where differences separating the priorities of youth and those of international agencies are especially prominent.
Drawing on interviews with development experts and young people, Marc Sommers shines a light on this gap and offers guidance on how to close it. He begins with a comprehensive consideration of forces that shape and propel the lives of African youth today, particularly those experiencing or emerging from war. They are contrasted with forces that influence and constrain the international development aid enterprise. The book concludes with a framework for making development policies and practices significantly more relevant and effective for youth in areas affected by African wars and other places where vast and vibrant youth populations reside.
eBook
The Wartime Template
Priorities are imperatives. They may be determined by child care responsibilities. A female youth with children and little or no support, for example, will be forced to make decisions that incorporate the need to ensure that her children are nearby. They may entail the assumption of an appointed familial role. A male youth may be expected to migrate to a city to make money so that his siblings can attend school. They may take the form of cultural mandates. Youth of both genders may leave school and dedicate themselves to marriage preparations, working to save money to, perhaps, secure livestock
Book Chapter
Demography and Alienation
One unavoidably confronts Africa’s demographic realities soon after arriving on the continent. After moving through airport customs and heading into a capital city, it is impossible not to notice youth everywhere. Lining the streets, angling alongside vehicles to sell sunglasses, watches, and batteries at traffic intersections, sitting idly under shade trees, Africa’s unprecedentedly youthful population and its rocketing urbanization are absolutely manifest. One distortion in this view is that it may seem that nearly all youth are male, since their female counterparts tend to be much less publicly prominent.
The sense of burgeoning youth populations and mushrooming cities is accentuated
Book Chapter
The Development Response
This chapter and this book aim to support promising reforms in the field of international development. The focus on inequality and extreme poverty is growing. The profile of and investment for youth in development work are increasing. These advances collectively provide important opportunities for enhancing the relevance, inclusiveness, and effectiveness of youth work specifically and development work more generally.
To contribute to these encouraging steps, this chapter will analyze forces that shape and challenge international development aid policies and programs. What follows is a general overview of development policies and practice and a consideration of some important implications of the
Book Chapter
Toward Youth Inclusion
This book details the vast gap between outcast youth in war-affected Africa and the international development enterprise. It reveals how international development aid is reaching marginalized youth ineffectively and inefficiently, including war-affected African youth, who are among those most in need of acceptance and support.
What follows is a framework for collectively supporting a process to reverse this trend and tap into the reserve of tenacity, ingenuity, and diverse skills that youth in war and postwar Africa, and elsewhere, have to offer. The framework aims to advance an inclusive approach to development work generally and youth development in particular. The
Book Chapter