Navigating the transition to male and female adulthood in Ethiopia
What different challenges do young men and young women face as they grow into adults?
What supports their efforts to pursue the adult lives they choose and value?
Which youth are most at risk of being left behind and how can they best be supported?
Over the course of 2020, a team of Young Lives researchers in Ethiopia and Oxford are collaborating to answer these questions with funding support from UNICEF Ethiopia and DFID Ethiopia’s Strategic Research Fund.
In 2019, researchers interviewed young men and women, aged 18 and 25, in ten rural and urban Young Lives communities to understand how gender, location, and poverty affected their diverging life paths.
Five of these sites are part of Young Lives qualitative longitudinal research making it the fifth wave of data collection. We have interviewed the same group about their lives five times since 2007.
The analysis is exploring eight inter-related aspects of their journey into adulthood and will produce papers and policy briefs on these topics: school to work transitions; work and employment; educational pathways; experiences of divorce and separation among youth; migration and mobility; young parenting; fertility decision-making; and gender and youth resilience. This work is a second phase of research analysis and builds on work undertaken in 2019 (see Publications above ) which was funded by UNICEF Ethiopia.
