‘Things have changed since we last spoke…’: The impacts of parental death on the life and livelihood of a young informal vendor in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Abstract

While an increasing number of studies concerning youth and informality have examined the complex relationship between youth, informal work and transitions to adulthood, this literature has paid little attention to how the death of a family member presents distinctive challenges to young vendors' life and livelihood progression. Addressing this, the paper draws on a case study of a small-scale informal worker in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, who was participating in in-depth ethnographic research when their father died suddenly. Through this, it investigates how parental death intersects with the challenges a young vendor experienced working informally while simultaneously attempting to achieve transitions to anticipated adulthood. Life-mapping interviews and participatory timeline diagrams were employed, gaining rich insights into a young vendor's experiences of parental death, revealing how these were shaped by an interplay between the past, present and future. More specifically, the research, which brings together literature concerning youth, informality and family relations, explores how parental death can (re)configure a young person's household roles, responsibilities and relations in response to sudden precarity in the present, reshaping priorities and plans towards achieving goals over different timeframes. Given persistent levels of informality and uncertainty across employment in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond, this article provides a timely contribution by highlighting the need for more studies to investigate how parental death creates and exacerbates the challenges youth vendors experience, constraining their abilities to grow and sustain their lives and livelihoods within the informal sector.