November 2024
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14 Reads
Information Technology for Development
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November 2024
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14 Reads
Information Technology for Development
November 2024
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9 Reads
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1 Citation
Critical African Studies
April 2024
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169 Reads
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5 Citations
Global Food Security
This perspective paper draws heavily on the last chapter of the book 'Youth and the Rural Economy in Africa: Hard Work and Hazard' (Sumberg et al., 2021b), based on 10 years of field studies. It synthesises findings and sets out their implications for policy relating to youth, agriculture and rural development. Overall, our research lends support to some elements of the standard stories around rural youth, while challenging others. However, even where we find broad support for dominant narratives, there is need for more nuance than is generally offered in shorthand treatments of ‘youth’ questions. We argue that this critical revisiting of the storytelling around youth in rural Africa has important implications for policy content and development interventions, particularly in relation to routes to social adulthood, food system transformation and food security.
August 2023
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16 Reads
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1 Citation
May 2023
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83 Reads
Development Policy Review
Motivation Paid work is key for women's empowerment, but many women work in precarious employment where they experience workplace sexual harassment. Articles in this special section explore how social norms and job informality influence women's perceptions about—and their voice and agency to counter—workplace sexual harassment. Purpose This introductory article highlights the academic and policy contribution of the special section by establishing how the articles collectively explore the relationship between social norms, job informality, and women's agency with respect to workplace sexual harassment, and the kinds of policies that may strengthen women's agency. Methods and approach Research in two countries explored how gender norms and informality in work arrangements influence young women's voice and agency in response to sexual harassment at work. This article introduces four articles based on the research findings and presents the themes that are explored in case studies with domestic workers and workers in agro‐processing factories in Bangladesh and Uganda. Findings The findings show that gender norms regarding sexuality and notions of family honour and shame constrain young women's ability to voice incidents of sexual harassment and their agency in seeking support from family and other actors; normalize male aggression; and sustain the perpetrators' impunity. These norms, alongside class and power hierarchies, affect the responses of the actors and institutions both within and outside their workplace. Given the precarious nature of their work, most workers avoid lodging formal complaints and rely on informal mechanisms for self‐protection. Policy implications The policy implications of the research include the importance of developing common language that will allow women to speak openly about their experiences; increasing access to and confidence in formal complaints mechanisms; developing young women's political capacities to challenge harassment; and address social and gender norms that constrain women and normalize harassment.
April 2023
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61 Reads
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4 Citations
Development Policy Review
Motivation Urbanization and the increasing number of double‐income households has led to a rise in demand for domestic workers in many African countries. With a population of over 75% people below 30 years of age, young people's unemployment is a major challenge for Uganda. Approximately 90% of young people work in the informal economy. Domestic workers' informal employment is unregulated and precarious. Purpose The article examines the role of social and gender norms in voicing and formal reporting of sexual harassment. It demonstrates the intersecting risk factors that create exposure to sexual harassment, challenges relating to voicing, as well as how restrictive norms are reproduced by other actors. Methods and approach The study adopted a qualitative research approach; desk review, qualitative, and visual methods. Primary data collection included safety audits and body mappings with groups of live‐in domestic workers and firm workers, and in‐depth individual interviews with domestic workers. Safety audits discussed forms of harassment and response mechanisms while the body mappings focused on language. Findings Isolated working conditions increase the risk of experiencing sexual harassment and limit avenues for reporting. Social and gender norms undermine domestic workers' ability to report it formally. The culture of silence and notions of victim blaming, stigmatization, and lack of a language that raises matters of sexual harassment all hinder women's voice towards self‐care and justice. Social and gender norms contribute to the persistence of sexual harassment through its normalization. Policy implications Domestic work should legally be recognized as work and labour laws need to extend to domestic workers. Workplace sexual harassment policy needs to extend to all workspaces, regardless of the number of employees. Domestic workers need better access to information, co‐workers, and associations, for instance through information technology. Advocacy for the rights of domestic workers and network building are recommended.
February 2023
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31 Reads
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6 Citations
Development Policy Review
The agro‐processing sector in Uganda provides jobs to large numbers of workers. While paid work is supposed to be empowering for women, the factory jobs are informal and unsafe, and workplace sexual harassment undermines women's empowerment. To enable decent jobs for women, it is important to understand what constrains their voice and agency in responding to workplace sexual harassment. The article aims to show how workplace sexual harassment is a key feature of precarious work for women working in low‐skilled, informal jobs in factories. The study asked how gender norms and informality in labour arrangements that are part of global, capitalist labour relations influence young women's voice and agency in response to sexual harassment at work. Twenty in‐depth interviews were carried out with factory workers in seven different agro‐processing factories in Uganda's capital Kampala, supplemented with participatory methods like safety audits and body mappings. We show the informal nature of jobs in factories and how precarious working conditions create the risks of experiencing sexual harassment by managers and supervisors. Keeping jobs informal enables factories to eschew workplace policies. Young women's experiences and articulation of sexual harassment are constrained by social and gender norms; and norms influence factory‐based mechanisms, where they exist. Women rely on informal tactics to prevent sexual harassment. The policy implications of the research include the importance of improving the implementation of formal complaints mechanisms; and especially developing young women's political capacities to protest collectively against harassment and seek redress, and addressing social and gender norms.
January 2023
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22 Reads
October 2022
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37 Reads
June 2022
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32 Reads
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8 Citations
African Affairs
This study contributes to debates on varieties of clientelism through an analysis of brokerage and ruling party patronage at urban markets in Harare, Zimbabwe. Urban markets are sites of contestation between the opposition-dominated city council and actors aligned with the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF). Based on qualitative case study research at two designated markets, the article demonstrates how ruling party brokers are central to organizing patronage and political mobilization, thus sustaining authoritarian politics. While ruling party patronage is a deliberate strategy to control urban spaces, the article demonstrates how it is being negotiated. Factionalism within ZANU-PF shifted the power of brokers, and the lockdown enforced in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in 2020 caused a rupture, offering the city council and opposition-aligned youth the opportunity to (re)claim control over vending spaces. This article contributes to debates on clientelism in authoritarian regime settings, by showing the imbrication of coercion and patronage in the role of the broker and demonstrating how patronage is organized vertically through brokerage. This study extends the study of clientelism beyond electoral politics, since brokers are not always politicians, but nonetheless are part of the systems of ruling party patronage.
... The active participation and empowerment of youth in agricultural enterprises must be given top priority in developing nations. Consequently, this will play a crucial role in propelling economic expansion, attaining food sovereignty, and eventually constructing a more sustainable future (Sumberg et al. 2024). Additionally, Nigeria is endowed with an abundance of resources that could lead to an abundant future in agriculture. ...
April 2024
Global Food Security
... Esta gran estadística deja a la mayoría de los jóvenes trabajadores del país por fuera de la normativa laboral que protege a los trabajadores que cuentan con trabajos formales. La precaria relación laboral de estos obreros expone a su gran mayoría a que las situaciones de acoso sexual se den con mayor frecuencia y la posibilidad de ser denunciados no se realiza por miedo a pérdida del empleo y la cultura del silencio frente a estas situaciones (Namuggala & Oosterom, 2023). ...
April 2023
Development Policy Review
... In Uganda's public health sector, sexual harassment reporting is supressed by real or threatened retaliation, victim-blaming and gaslighting (Newman et al., 2021). Similar results were found in other sectors in Uganda Oosterom et al., 2023). Several studies have identified sexual harassment as a problem at the University of Zambia, with perceptions of its severity differing by gender (Kampyongo et al., 2017;Menon et al., 2009Menon et al., , 2014. ...
February 2023
Development Policy Review
... Such interventions could also, of course, have potentially strong synergistic effects with extension, education, training, and other investments targeting youth in the variable and risk-prone rural environments and economic contexts that are pervasive. Oosterom et al. (2021) and the research reported in the other chapters of Youth and the Rural Economy amply illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of the frameworks, methods, data and analytical approaches that underpin current understandings of young people's engagement with the rural economy. Here we highlight some specific steps with the potential to significantly increase the quality and relevance of the evidence base, and thus contribute positively to understanding, policy and practice. ...
April 2021
... Childhood and youth studies are undergoing a theoretical and conceptual revision, creating fertile ground for critical thinking aiming at decolonising respective fields of study [24][25][26][27]. Conceptualisations of child and youth agency flourish with increased emphasis on interdependency and relational aspects [21,28], and concepts like waithood and stuckness reflect how underprivileged children and youth deal with their challenges [29][30][31][32]. Further, scholars pay increased attention to the future aspirations of the young and their emotional expressions of anticipation and hopefulness [33,34]. ...
April 2021
... Our findings provide critical implications for youth employment policies, interventions, and programs in Africa. Juan et al., 2023;Sumberg et al., 2021;Yeboah and Boafo, 2024a;Yeboah, 2017;Yeboah et al., 2020). This is particularly so because Africa is regarded as the youngest continent, with over 250 million people between 15 and 24 years old (UN World Population Prospects, 2019, p. 58). ...
April 2021
... This perspectives paper draws heavily on the last chapter of Youth and the Rural Economy (Sumberg et al., 2021b). It synthesises findings and sets out their implications for policy relating to youth, agriculture and rural development. ...
April 2021
... While there was great hope of a change in fortunes after the 2017 coup that ousted former President Robert Mugabe, the situation has hardly improved since then. Due to the protracted economic and political crisis, new and largely informal livelihoods have emerged as people try to get by ( Gukurume 2019; Oosterom and Gukurume 2022 ). Small-scale fishing has emerged as one livelihood activity potentially contributing to mitigating poverty in Zimbabwe, and in Africa in general ( Chan et al. 2019 ). ...
June 2022
African Affairs
... This comparative study can help us to distill how and why the politics of resource management and peacebuilding by state and local leaders in ethnically and religiously diverse Plateau State and ethnically divided and religiously homogeneous Central Darfur region, both of which are battling with pre-existing political crises, influence the nature and dynamics of resourcebased conflicts in Africa. In Plateau State, the farmer-herder conflict is embedded in decades of ethno-religious violence and political crises, which have been the focus of extensive research (Best 2007;Human Rights Watch 2013;Madueke 2019;Oosterom et al. 2021). While the government has managed to contain the political crises through excessive military deployment (Obaj and Okeke-Uzodike 2013), the conflict over indigene rights and access to resources remains unaddressed (Krause, 2019). ...
December 2021
The Journal of Modern African Studies
... It denotes a concept in the Shona language of getting by and solving problems with limited resources or opportunities (cf. Mate 2014Mate , 2021bGukurume 2019;Oosterom and Gukurume 2021;Taru and Settler 2015). It might be loosely translated into the English term "hustling." ...
October 2021