Youth transition, agricultural education and employment in Uganda: freeing individual agency

ABSTRACT The reality of the troubles young people encounter in navigating confining social and institutional settings to become productive workers and flourishing citizens in sub-Saharan African countries like Uganda continues to attract all sorts of theoretical and social policy assumptions. One such prominent assumption is the idea that increased young people’s participation in agricultural education and work has the potential to stem escalating youth unemployment. The related narrative that young people are less keen to plunge their learning and work life in agriculture owing to its low social status poses a huge education and labour policy dilemma across SSA and similar contexts. Amid this dilemma are narratives, which seem to underplay the influential social arrangements that structure the education–work trajectories of young people and the perceptions and practice of micro-social actors in the agriculture education and labour markets. Questionable narratives that often attempt to frame young people as authors of their own troubled work transitions abound sections of social policy and development discourse. Moreover, mainstream research and evaluative studies in Uganda and similar contexts do have a traditional focus on macro and meso structures with limited methodological interest into the voices and experiences of frontline social actors. Accordingly, this qualitative study is an in-depth examination of personal and contextual influences on young people’s agricultural education-employment transitions; and exploration of how to improve transition processes for optimising learning and labour market outcomes. The findings reveal unprecedented resilience and volitions of young people to advance their education–work trajectories despite the structural barriers. The study showed a reasonable degree of enthusiasm amongst some micro-social actors in supporting young people on their life transitions though often constrained by confining social and institutional arrangements. The study yielded robust evidence into the difficulties to cause AET system improvements for better student outcomes but also delivered incredible insights for making change possible. Freeing and nurturing the individual agency of Ugandan young people to choose and pursue agricultural education and work aspirations along the constricting pathways enacted as part of societal canalisation is among the core elements of this thesis. The agency freedom and professional autonomy of frontline social actors, especially agricultural educators to enable them to practise craftsmanship, democracy and associated transformative approaches for better preparation of young people to navigate their education and career trajectories is equally a core argument of this thesis.