West African Youth Challenges and Opportunity Pathways

This open-access edited collection, focusing on Ghana and Nigeria, offers a transatlantic, transnational exploration of barriers that threaten the wellbeing of West African youthranging from Black immigrant youth in the American city of Newark, New Jersey, to students in Almajiri Islamic schools in Northern Nigeria. Incorporating themes of migration, vulnerability, and agency and aspirations, the book conveys the resilience of African youth transitioning toward adulthood in a world of structural inequality. It thus crosses the academic divide between Youth Studies and African Studies, while challenging conventional framings of Black youth as deficient and deviantpositing instead their individual and collective creativity and assets. The contributors employ different methodological approaches, including field research and autoethnography, from varying multidisciplinary and practitioner perspectives.

Challenges assumptions about African youth migration within, to, and from Western Africa Explores the potential of training programs aimed at preparing youth with low levels of educational attainment for income-earning opportunities in non-traditional sectors of employment Sheds light on how urban school districts in the United States would benefit from more research on the heterogeneity of Black student populations, given increasing numbers of youth from West African immigrant families

Auteur

Mora L. McLean is a researcher, writer, part-time university lecturer, and President Emerita of the Africa-America Institute (AAI). As a Senior Fellow with the Cornwall Center at Rutgers University-Newark, she was principal investigator for the Ford Foundation-supported 2017 Forum on West African Youth Learning and Opportunity Pathways. Her published essays include "What about the reciprocity? Pan-Africanism and the promise of global development," in M.O. Okome & O. Vaughan's Transnational Africa and Globalization (Palgrave, 2012).

Contenu
Introduction; Mora Mclean.- 1. Education for All: The Case of Out of School Migrants in Ghana; Daniel Kyereko.- 2. Irregular Migration as Survival Strategy: Narratives from Vulnerable Youth in Urban Nigeria; Lanre Olusegun Ikuteyijo.- 3. Untold Stories: Newark's Burgeoning West African Population and the In-School Experiences of African Immigrant Youth; Michael Simmons and Mahako Etta.- 4. Police-Youth Relations: On the Ground Perspectives from Nigeria´s Federal Capital; Samuel Oluwole Ojewale.- 5. "To become somebody in the future": Exploring the Content of Youth Aspirations in Urban Nigeria; Dabesaki Mac-Ikemenjima.- 6. Someone has to tell these children: You can be as good as anybody!; Cecilia Fiaka.- 7. The Limits of Individual Level Factors for Girls Achievement in Ghana and South Africa; Sally A. Nuamah.- 8. Youth Employment and Labour Market Vulnerability in Ghana: Aggregate Trends and Determinants; Adedeji Adeniran, Adekunle Yusuf, and Joseph Ishaku.- 9. The Role ofeTrash2Cash in Curbing the Menace of Almajiri Vulnerability in Nigeria through Waste Management Social Micro-entrepreneurship; Alh. Muhammad Salisu Abdullahi.- 10. Burden, Drivers, and Impacts of Poor Mental Health in Young People of West and Central Africa: Implications for Research and Programming; Kenneth Juma, Frederick Wekesah, Boniface Ushie, Caroline W. Kabiru, and Chimaraoke Izugbara.