Negotiating the Livelihoods of Children and Youth in Africa's Urban Spaces

8. Youths’ Poverty and Livelihood Strategies in Fegge, Onitsha Urban Local Government Area, Nigeria

8 Youths’ Poverty and Livelihood Strategies in Fegge, Onitsha Urban Local Government Area, Nigeria Peter Ezeah Introduction The world has in recent times been experiencing rapid urbanization. Presently, over 80 per cent of children and youths live in urban cities of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Unicef 2002:21). Sub-Saharan Africa is said to have the most youthful populations in the world. An estimated 200 million young people between the ages of 12 and 24 years live in Africa’s urban cities today. This rapid rate of growth has pushed the absolute size of the youth population in Sub-Saharan Africa beyond that of many other regions. By 2030, youths will account for 28 per cent of the population, making Sub-Saharan African the ‘youngest’ region in the world (Garcia and Fares 2008:5). The implication of this scenario is that the growth of the population of children and youths is bound to outstrip the coping capacity of poorly resourced governments and economies in developing nations, such as most nations in Africa, to absorb new residents and provide them with adequate jobs, shelter and services. In these circumstances, many if not most children and youths may end up in substandard housing in unserviced and marginal locations with exposure to health hazards and poor nutrition as well as other livelihood challenges. In Nigeria, an estimated 20 per cent of children and youths are found in cities (Wikipedia, accessed 10th October 2009). Many of the urban youths live in squalid slum dwellings with poor basic infrastructure and social services. Given the situation they are confronted with, the youths are bound to initiate and construct various forms of adaptation as livelihood strategies to enable them to survive and stay in the city. Onitsha is a densely populated city and has a very high percentage of its population made up of youths that migrated from the many communities that Negotiating the Livelihoods of Children and Youth in Africa’s Urban Spaces 124 make up the South East geographical zone of Nigeria. Livelihood opportunities are the major attraction of youths to the city. Conceptual Issues Around the world the terms ‘youth’, ‘adolescent’, ‘teenager’, and ‘young person’ are interchangeable term, often meaning the same thing but occasionally differentiated: ‘youth’ generally refers to the time of life that is neither childhood nor adulthood, but rather somewhere in between (Wikipedia, accessed 10th October 2009). The age varies at which a person is considered a ‘youth’ and thus eligible for special treatment under the law and throughout society. The United Nations defines youth as those persons between the ages of 15 and 24, while for the World Bank, youth generally refers to those between the ages of 15 and 25 (Wikipedia, accessed 10th October 2009). The African Union defines youth as persons between the ages of 15 and 35 (African Union Charter 1999). United Nations and Commonwealth Association of Nations Charters (2000) defined youth as persons between the ages 14 and 30. For the purpose of this work, youth is defined as those persons aged between 14 and 30. This is the accepted definition of youth in Nigeria which informs the pegging of the maximum age for the National Youth Service Corps programme at 30 years. The recent attention paid to urban livelihoods follows from a wide recognition that significant proportions of urban poor in developing countries are vulnerable in terms of their sustainable livelihood systems. Because of the absence of formal employment opportunities in the city, youths take to various forms of informal economic activity as livelihood strategies in order to survive. Urban poverty in developing countries is predicated on the fact that the major urban centres in these countries face tremendous pressure of population with insufficient infrastructure and social services (Hossain 2005). The urbanization of poverty and the impacts of structural adjustment programmes have lead to a situation in which for many of Africa’s poor, urban spaces provide opportunities as well as fears and economic hardships in livelihood provision. Anan (2000:29) captures this succinctly: Cities are often described as cradles of civilization and sources of cultural and economic renaissance but, for the roughly one third of the developing world’s urban population that lives in extreme poverty, they are anything but that. Most of these urban poor have no option but to find housing in squalid and unsafe squatter settlements or slums. And even though the population of cities like countries has on the average become older, slum dwellers are getting younger. The most...