Relationality and context: Understanding Ghanaian youth lives and schooling under conditions of climate crisis

• In Event: Teacher, student, and practitioner perspectives on contemporary issues in gender and education

Proposal

This article, rooted in youth’s everyday lives and practices in Futakɔƒe, Ghana and its school, asks how we should conceive of youth wellbeing, and the role of schooling in strengthening wellbeing, under conditions of climate crisis and environmental degradation (CCED). Schooling plays a central, yet complex and sometimes quite contradictory, role in many youth’s lives; it is also the site of the Ghanaian state’s most direct investment in and engagement with youth. As humanity wrestles with questions of surviving, thriving under, and transforming CCED, we must account for the role of formal schooling in youth wellbeing. We attempt to entwine the here-and-now and the future, and to confront the diverse responsibilities that youth and their families face as they navigate CCED and try to forge viable futures for themselves. We argue that the patterns of gendered and classed participation in secondary education that we observed in Futakɔƒe illuminate broader CCED-induced consequences on youth, family systems, and schooling of unraveling ecosystems, monetization of natural services, and dwindling income-generating opportunities.

This moment calls for a reconceptualization of how schooling might support youth wellbeing under conditions of rapid CCED. To do so, we conducted youth-centered qualitative research with grade 8 students in Futakɔƒe, and with their teachers, families, and community leaders. From this research, we developed an analysis of youth’s experiences of CCED and schooling that centers the gendered material, environmental, and socio-economic contexts and relationships of care and responsibilities that shape youth’s daily lives, in and out of school. Our analysis reveals how these contexts and relationships are being weakened by CCED in ways that destabilize children’s and youth’s wellbeing and schooling. At the same time, schooling provides few tools to navigate these changes, which exacerbates youth’s (particularly boys’) departure from school.

This article draws from research that examined the two-way relationship between CCED and schooling in one fishing community in Ghana. Rooted in the daily lives and experiences of 12 grade 8 focal students, the research in each community included formal interviews, walk-arounds, extensive school-based observations, and chats with each purposefully selected focal student; interviews and focus group discussions with head teachers, teachers, community leaders, parents, community members, and district officials; observations of home and labor spaces; and a review of curricular and policy documents (authors, 2022). Focal students were selected to represent a diversity of 8th grade student experiences. The four girls and four boys who participated as focal students in Futakɔƒe lived near and far from the school, had better and worse school performance, came from wealthier and less wealthy families, and lived in diverse household situations. The in-depth research we conducted with them was accompanied by additional one-time interviews, observations, and chats with their classmates.

Our research shows how youth in Futakɔƒe have had to take on larger financial and labor burdens over time, though these differ systematically for girls and boys, and for youth from wealthier and poorer households. Girls were more likely to live with close relatives (parents, grandparents) and did significantly more unpaid household and care work: drawing water, collecting firewood, cooking, taking care of younger siblings and older relatives, sweeping and washing, and so forth. In a sense, they performed public goods for the family. As a result, they were more integrated into the family structure. This seemed to provide them with more family support and protection, which helped them stay in school. For example, almost all girls in the research ate food provided by their family. They still often worked to earn money for uniforms, fees, and other needs, but limited work outside the home made schooling feasible when combined with family support for food and housing.

In contrast, boys were much more likely to live with distal relatives or relations (aunts, bosses) and were generally expected to be more responsible for themselves. Boys also did chores like collecting water and washing dishes, but they tended to do these things only for their own use. In other words, they were doing household work that was considered a private good. For example, one young man was living with his aunt, who made and sold porridge every morning. He said his aunt made him buy porridge from her because he didn’t carry water for her.

Because boys received less care and family protection, it was harder for them to stay in school. They often had to work for more hours for pay than did girls. On the other hand, because of the gendered nature of work, they had many more opportunities for higher-paid labor than did female peers, and they were not expected to participate in unpaid household reproductive labor.

In Futakɔƒe, CCED is fraying economic and social relations for most youth and their families. In practice, the nexus of these relational and contextual forces is drawing more JHS boys out of school than girls, but both boys and girls are increasingly struggling to chart a path through schooling. It is clear that CCED is fraying ecological, as well as economic and social, relations. And it is clear that CCED has multivalent impacts on schooling.

Students’ stories elucidate the centrality of relationships of mutual care that can sustain or undermine youth’s wellbeing and education. The stories also elucidate how and why youth’s core relationships are under increasing strain: driven by fraying ecologies; declines in access to healthy food, water, and fuel sources; migration patterns that vacate local support systems; and accelerated wealth inequalities, among other forces. This in turn increases demands on youth to sustain themselves in the face of narrowing opportunities for thriving, in ways that generally do not align with either attending or benefitting from formal schooling. But, the out-of-school alternatives for youth in Futakɔƒe are increasingly constrained as well, by the “end” of free or low-cost basic resources (water, protein, fuel, land), and the increasing difficulties that proximal relations have in providing a safety net. It is within this understanding of youth’s experiences of CCED that educators, policymakers, and youth should begin to (re)imagine if and how schooling can support better futures.

Authors

• Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Sophia Friedson-Ridenour, The World Bank