Elizabeth Cooper

Questioning the Power of Resilience: Are Children Up to the Task of Disrupting the Transmission of Poverty?

The development and application of the concept of resilience as a tool for examining the ways in which young humans are able to overcome the negative outcomes of poverty and prevent its transfer within families, households and communities and assesses its usefulness for poverty researchers and practitioners [CPRC WP 73].

Inheritance: A Gendered and Intergenerational Dimension of Poverty

This collection of articles contains new and important findings concerning the scale and significance of asset transfers through inheritance among different populations, as well as the ways in which inheritance affects economic and social status and mobility. Evidence exists of women commonly losing access to assets when properties are redistributed following a spouses death. This and the household effects of gaining or losing access to heritable property highlight the gendered and intergenerational dimensions of inheritance. As an introduction to the collection, this article provides an overview of how inheritance has been understood in poverty‐related policy and research up to now. We then synthesise what the new findings presented in this collection tell us about inheritance as a crucial factor in womens poverty and the intergenerational transmission of poverty, highlighting what other researchers and policy‐makers can take from this research to address the gendered and intergenerational dimensions of inheritance in different contexts.

Women and Inheritance in Sub‐Saharan Africa: What Can Change?

This article analyses how inheritance is being addressed to enhance socio‐economic equity and opportunities in five sub‐Saharan African countries: Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Rwanda and Uganda. Based on interviews with governmental and non‐governmental actors, as well as policy analysis and reviews of the literature, it considers how inheritance is understood as a public policy issue, and focuses attention on three areas that offer opportunities for safeguarding womens inheritance: marriage; customary land governance; and local arbitration. Initiatives to change policies and practices related to these areas are discussed, together with the lessons that can be learned.

Inheritance and the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: Policy Considerations

In many Sub-Saharan African societies, inheritance is one of the most common means by which physical property is transferred from one generation to another. As such, policy initiatives concerning the intergenerational transmission of poverty (IGT poverty) would do well to attend to how inheritance systems are governed, and particularly which considerations affect who is included and excluded. This requires examination of both legal and political rights of property ownership, as well as context-specific values, norms and dynamics of social organisation.This paper is a review of existing research and policy that address issues of inheritance and IGT poverty. It is organised into three main sections: the first outlines what is known about how inheritance correlates with IGT poverty; the middle section discusses specific initiatives that have been proposed or taken to affect inheritance in Sub-Saharan African countries; and the last section lists some key points for policy makers and researchers to consider in developing future initiatives concerning inheritance and IGT poverty.

What do we know about out‐of‐school youths? How participatory action research can work for young refugees in camps

This paper reports on an initiative that took the strategy of youth consultation in programme planning one step further by putting a research projects design, data collection, analysis and presentation of findings in the hands of young women and men who have experienced education and discontinuity of education in a long‐term refugee camp. The participatory action research (PAR) process is described and assessed with attention to how PAR may serve as a practical, credible and ethical methodology for research with refugee youths about refugee youths. This case study reflects that PAR can yield new insights for developing youth‐focused initiatives and positive personal experiences for youth participants, including limited forms of empowerment. Ultimately, however, the structural inequalities imposed by refugee status require redress if the goal is the long‐term empowerment of youths in camps.

Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa: An Introduction

The starting point of this collection is to understand the positive and productive potential of uncertainty in Africa. The relevance of the focus on uncertainty in Africa is not only that contemporary life is objectively risky and unpredictable (since it is so everywhere and in every period), but that uncertainty has become a dominant trope, an ‘inevitable force’ (Johnson-Hanks 2005: 366), in the subjective experience of life in contemporary African societies. This routinized perception of uncertainty is sometimes coined as ‘the crisis’ — the conjunction of economic depression, instabilities, fluctuations, and ruptures — giving rise to experiences lived by people at all levels of society defined by physical and mental violence (Mbembe & Roitman 1995: 324). It is against this context of ‘incoherence, uncertainty, and instability’ that we may better account for the ways in which people weave their existence. Indeed, by foregrounding ‘crisis as context’ (Vigh 2006) we begin to see how uncertainty critically shapes ways of knowing and being on the continent. Hence, the analysis of radical, routinized uncertainty offers a productive conceptual apparatus to describe Africa’s complexity and to account for ‘the power of the unforeseen and of the unfolding…[and] people’s relentless determination to negotiate conditions of turbulence to introduce order and predictability into their lives’ (Mbembe & Nuttall 2004: 349).

The Importance of Being Serious: Subjectivity and Adulthood in Kenya

ABSTRACT While anthropological scholarship on the life course transitions of young people has aimed to contribute to theories of structure and agency, social reproduction and change, it has done so relatively independently from the anthropological literature on subject formation. This paper explores how subjectivity – how people feel, think, and experience – is implicated in grappling with life course transitions. It addresses how ‘being serious’ is considered a critical adult competency and its achievement delineates a key life transition that young women in western Kenya variously resent and value, resist and seek. The analysis illuminates ways in which people grapple with their own subjectivity as a problem as well as a project, and how such problems and projects of subjectivity are problems and projects of social reproduction. I argue that taking account of such subjective transformations can augment political economy analysis of meanings and modes of life.