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ABSTRACT
While Kenyan youth comprise the majority of the Kenyan electorate, they are typically either stereotyped as criminals or marginalized, rather than taken seriously as politically important actors. The importance of youth in Kenya, and the gaps in our knowledge about this group, prompt us to investigate their views at the cusp of political becoming. Reporting on a survey of 4,773 secondary school students in Nairobi, we argue that understanding this youth population’s perspectives and relationship to the state – ‘seeing like students’ – is critical to any understanding of Kenya today and its future. Our study shows empirically that secondary school youth in Nairobi are perceptive about the challenges facing the country, civically engaged, and hopeful about the future. With views that often differ by ethnicity, gender, or socio-economic background, our findings highlight the importance of acknowledging youths’ complex on-the-ground realities and challenging dominant discourses about youth.
Acknowledgements
We very gratefully acknowledge the many participants in Nairobi who generously shared their time, thoughts, and experiences; Women Educational Researchers of Kenya (WERK); Hedwig Ombunda, Faith Nyagitati, and Richard Kandie, who contributed to data collection under the leadership of Jonah Ondieki; the many enthusiastic clerks and enumerators involved in data entry; graduate students Sorana Acris, Amanda Blewitt, Emily Dunlop, and Isa Spoerry at NYU; and many others for their useful contributions, including the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS). This work was supported by the Lyle Spencer Foundation under Grant 201700045.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Joshua Masinde, “Will Kenya’s Youth Vote Swing the Country’s Election?”, CNN, 3 August 2017. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/08/02/africa/kenya-election-youth-vote/index.html
2 Kenya National Assembly, Official Record Hansard, 28.
3 Education Development Center, Inc. [EDC], Cross-Sectoral Assessment; International Crisis Group [ICG], Annual Report 2012; ICG, Annual Report 2014; Meleagrou-Hitchens, “Jihad Comes to Kenya.”
4 Mwangola, “Youth and Politics.”
5 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want,” 149.
6 Mwangola, “Youth and Politics.”
7 United Nations, The Missing Peace, 3.
8 United Nations, The Missing Peace, 5; Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; Urdal, “A Clash of Generations?”
9 Nordås and Davenport, “Fight the Youth.”
10 Mwangola, “Youth and Politics,” 226; Kabiru et. al, “Growing Up at the ‘Margins.’”
11 UK Department for International Development [DfID], Next Generation Kenya, 5, 15.
12 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want,” 135.
13 Scott, Seeing Like a State.
14 UNESCO Institute for Statistics [UIS-UNESCO], Statistics Data.
15 Bleck, Education and Empowered Citizenship.
16 See Kimari et al, “Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation”, this issue.
17 Juárez et. al, “Youth Migration and Transitions”; Steinberg, Age of Opportunity.
18 Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis; Guerra and Olenik, Cross-Sectoral Youth Development, 5.
19 First author’s notes.
20 Steinberg, Age of Opportunity; Honwana, The Time of Youth.
21 Grant and Furstenberg, “Changes in the Transition”; Lloyd, Growing up Global; Sommers, Stuck.
22 Honwana, The Time of Youth; Singerman, “Economic Imperatives of Marriage”; Sommers, Stuck.
23 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UNDESA], “Youth Fact Sheet”; Olenik and Takyi-Larea, Examining the Evidence, 3.
24 Sommers, “Urban Youth in Africa.”
25 Sommers, Stuck.
26 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want.”
27 Njonjo, Youth Research Compendium, 56.
28 Büscher, “African Cities and Violent Conflict,” 193.
29 Actually, 57 schools fit our selection criteria. The 58th school was accidentally sampled due to a practical mix-up between schools with similar names. We decided to also include the data from this 58th school.
30 Placement in secondary school is based on achievement on the primary school exit exam. National schools are the most selective, requiring the highest scores, followed by Provincial schools, then County schools, then District schools. Note that while the most expensive private schools are of very high quality, generally, private schools are of lower quality than public schools, a trend one observes across Africa.
31 In one school, we believe that the principal may have hand-picked students to participate and exclude. In another school, some were away for a sporting event.
32 Scacco, Anatomy of a Riot.
33 Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies [INEE], 2015 Round Table.
34 Berge et al., “Ethnically Biased?”, p. 140; Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. 2019 Kenya Population and Housing Census, p. 423.
35 CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ke.html.
36 United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], “Gini coefficient.”
37 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want,” 149; Mwangola “Youth and Politics,” 237.
38 Pring, People and Corruption, 35.
39 Afrobarometer, “Kenya Round 7 data.”
40 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want,” 149.
41 Afrobarometer, “Kenya Round 7 data,” item 85a.
42 Dionne, “Here’s what it means to be Somali”; Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders.
43 Monaghan and King, Youth Education Programming.
44 Norwegian Refugee Council [NRC], Assessment of Youth Education.
45 Kimari et al, “Youth, the Kenyan state and a politics of contestation”, this issue.
46 O’Donnell, Democracy, Agency, and the State.
47 Van de Walle, African Economies.
48 United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], “Human Development Index.”
49 World Bank, “Poverty Headcount Ratio.”
50 Nie, Junn, and Stehlik-Berry, Education and Democratic Citizenship.
51 Bleck, Education and Empowered Citizenship, 8.
52 EDC, Cross-Sectoral Assessment.
53 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want,” 144.
54 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want.”
55 Transparency International, The Anti-Corruption Catalyst.
56 In a study of the United States, income inequality among youth, yet not among adults, is associated with greater civic engagement, especially among youth from racial and ethnic minority groups and of low socio-economic status. (Godfrey and Cherng, “The Kids are All Right?”)
57 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want.”
58 Ibid.
59 Wrong, Our Turn to Eat.
60 King, “What Kenyan Youth Want,”; Mwangola, “Youth and Politics.”