Across urban African contexts, diverse youth experience specific barriers to accessing livelihoods, which poses significant constraints to exercising their agency. This experience is a context for particular forms of violence, both directed towards, and perpetrated by, young people in gendered ways. Despite this, there are limited analyses of the gender dimensions of the youth–security nexus in African cities, and a lack of research on how intersecting systems of power shape gendered relations, experiences and outcomes.

Narratives surrounding these issues have tended to present reductive binary understandings of the “vulnerability” of women to, and perpetration by male youth of, violence. This paper argues for the need to develop deeper and more nuanced accounts of the complex, gendered processes through which (in)security is made, experienced and resisted.

We draw together existing but disparate analyses to synthesise existing knowledge on the gender, youth and (in)security nexus in African cities and to propose future directions for research. Drawing on data from exploratory research conducted in cities in the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC), we discuss these in the light of existing literature. We draw on ACRC’s political settlements framing to reveal the interconnectedness of youth, gender and insecurity with dynamic urban (in/formal) political processes that shape, and often constrain, opportunities for youth. We argue that using a youth-gender-(in)security lens, advanced by a lived experience methodology, can help to centre agency and counter harmful gender stereotypes.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute