Being young, Kenyan and gendered: the outcomes of schooling and transitions to adulthood in poor urban and rural settings
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Date
2009-09
Authors
Chege, Fatuma N.
Arnot, M.
Wainaina, Paul K.
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Abstract
This paper which is derived from findings of the Education, Youth, Gender and Citizenship
(YGC) project1 foregrounds the experiences and outcomes of schooling as constructed through
the voices of young female and male Kenyan youth aged between 18 and 25 years who lived in
conditions of relative material poverty in one of the urban communities of the study2. Using
qualitative data mainly from interviews, the paper demonstrates how young men and women from
impoverished families and communities constructed the outcomes of their schooling,
demonstrating the realities of how they negotiated their daily lives and experiences that were
build upon some broken promise from a formal education that had failed to deliver them –and
their families- out of the cycle of poverty. The expressed need to transform their lives by break out
of the cycle of poverty while at the same retaining a sense of belonging to their families and local
communities - ‘home and family’ – formed the dominant discourse in the voices of the young
women and men –most of who seemed eager to project and be heard. The study findings capture
articulations of the value attached to formal education as a communal and individual investment
even when the experience of schooling was itself portrayed as a failure in delivering the
economic expectations of this young generation of hopeful Kenyan women and men. The explicit
difference between young people’s educational aspirations and expectations of schooling vis-àvis
the realities of its outcomes as experienced in their daily lives provided the young people a
point of departure in interrogating other non-economic benefits of schooling – which in one way
or another enhanced their well-being and made them different from the non-schooled peers.
Findings demonstrated that the level of schooling –primary and secondary- influenced the
articulation of non-economic (social and human development) outcomes of schooling. Gender
also seemed to influenced the manner in which the social and human development outcomes of
schooling were played out among the youth with the young men presenting themselves as
community focused in terms of seeking ways to transforming their environments while the young
women were keen in changing their own lives and of their offspring. Thus, the route for escaping
poverty was constructed differently between the women and the men while articulation of the
means of escape was considerably more concretised among the youth with secondary education.
It is in this context that this paper interrogates the implications of different levels of schooling
among young Kenyan women and men who live in poor urban settlements.
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Citation
UKFIET Oxford International Conference on Education and Development, 15-17 September 2009, 22 pp.