‘Street citizenship’: informal processes of engaging youth as citizens through research and knowledge exchange in three African cities

ABSTRACT

Street-living youth are deprived of formal citizenship due to their age and exclusion from school or other state apparatus through which cultural/moral values are shared. Drawing on participatory longitudinal data from research in three African cities, this paper explores a nuanced ‘street citizenship’ as facilitated through informal processes and spaces, suggesting ‘street citizenship’ can be active and sometimes activist, with the potential to challenge understandings of poverty and marginalization in childhood more widely. Street-living youth’s lived citizenship practices are developed at various scales within communities, cities and states and through engagement with local communities, civil society, policymakers and governments.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• street youth
• African cities
• knowledge exchange

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the exceptional work of all the young researchers and network members that contributed to Growing up on the streets. For ethical reasons they are not named, but this should not lessen the vital importance of their contributions. We also acknowledge the support of StreetInvest and NGO partners: in particular, Selassy Gbeglo, Street Girls Aid, Ghana; Thomas D’Aquin, PEDER, DRCongo and Shaibu Chitsiku, Street Empowerment Trust, Zimbabwe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Lorraine van Blerk is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Dundee.

Wayne Shand is an Independent Research Consultant and Associate Staff Member at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester.

Janine Hunter is Researcher at the University of Dundee. Together they led and developed the Growing up on the Streets longitudinal participatory research and knowledge exchange project with street youth in African cities between 2012 and 2020.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funding we received to carry out the research and knowledge exchange work on which this paper is based. The Research was funded by the Backstage Trust in collaboration with StreetInvest. Knowledge Exchange was funded by the ESRC. Reference: ES/M006107/1