The notion of transitions is critically important in the fields of children’s and youth studies. For example, transitioning from dependence toward independence, or from school toward work. Key insights from rural Africa show that such transitions have individual, social and economic dimensions. Specific transitions can also occur earlier or later, are often gendered, take a variety of forms, are non-linear, and can be quite messy.
Unfortunately, policy discourses in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) often lack appreciation of the importance of transitions in human development and socialisation. Policy problems are too often framed using categories like ‘children’ and ‘youth’ that are set-out with hard boundaries (i.e., based solely on chronological age).
These primarily serve bureaucratic, administrative and/or legal purposes. The result is that education, youth and employment, while closely linked through the school-to-work transition, are dealt with by different ministries with different political imperatives. This creates a major challenge for policy coherence and, more importantly, for young people attempting to navigate change.
Transitions are also given short shrift in the narratives that underpin much policy discourse concerning children and youth in rural SSA, and their respective engagements – both current and future – with agriculture.
Policy narratives and policy objectives
For children (usually defined as up to 18-years old), dominant narratives stress the prominence of and harms associated with child labour; that children’s work is always at odds with schooling; and consequently, children need to be protected by restricting their ability to work. Here, the key policy objective is framed in terms of the abolition of child labour. This sits uncomfortably with the substantial evidence of widespread engagement by children with all kinds of agricultural and domestic work across the whole of SSA. Much of this engagement is viewed positively by children, their parents and communities.
Rural youth, in contrast, are portrayed in dominant policy narratives as innovative, and full of energy and entrepreneurial spirit, which gives them the potential to transform the sub-continent’s lagging agricultural sector. To unlock this potential, however, they need greater awareness of the opportunities offered by agriculture, plus technical and business training, access to technology and credit etc. The provision of these enablers has become a central policy objective.
How two such contrasting images – children in desperate need of protection, and youth able to drive agricultural transformation – can dominate policy discourse begs further exploration. This is particularly so as the age-ranges used by states to delineate the categories children and youth most often overlap.
Challenging existing narratives
The policy narratives provide no hint as to how children transition from dependent, vulnerable and in need of protection, to being able to restructure rural economies. Perhaps this silence can be filled with human capital theory, where investment in basic education (primary and lower secondary) creates a new generation of rural entrepreneurs. Possibly, but this seems unlikely as school attendance and learning outcomes in rural areas throughout SSA continue to be poor.
Or does the silence reflect an assumption that young people can build on the technical skills and attitudes to work they learned as children while helping on the family farm? Again, possibly, but this would certainly contradict the idea that much of this work is harmful, and thus a rightful target for elimination.
In fact, the problem is much deeper than the lack of attention to, or theorisation around, a missing transition. There is a growing body of scholarship that undermines most of the key elements of both of these narratives, including, for example, that while school is safe, work is harmful; that school and work are incompatible; that youth are particularly well positioned to transform food systems for the better; that African agriculture represents a vast entrepreneurial opportunity; and that rural youth are particularly innovative.
The children, work and school nexus
There is clearly an important job to be done in developing alternative policy narratives about the children, work and school nexus, and about youth involvement in SSA’s agriculture sector. If these new narratives are to play a positive role in policy processes, they must each be internally coherent. And, it is equally important that there is coherence across the narratives, just as there is most often some level of coherence across the phases and transitions of young lives.
A key here will be to break free from the chains of legal-political-administrative categories like children and youth, and stop them from being imposed on rural communities to the detriment of all.
