4. Youth poverty dynamic trajectories

Summary: The key argument of the analysis is that recent challenging contemporaneous political, economic, climatic and demographic trends have intersected with rising individual- and householdlevel vulnerabilities to create new models of inclusion for young adults in Niger. Amongst chronically poor youth in Tahoua and Zinder, barriers to education were high due to the inability to meet fees/feeding needs, which ends in either exclusion by school administrators or self-exclusion. In terms of livelihoods, access to a small amount of capital to make the transition from working as poorly paid farm or family labourers to potentially more rewarding self-employment is highly constrained for both young men and women. As a result, chronically poor youth tend to stay in the same daily part-time farm or off-farm job combinations over time. Limited capital also means that they may rent in productive assets rather than owning them, further limiting their ability to generate a profit from the livelihood over time. Linked to this, price-taking is prevalent in commission-based services, particularly among the less tenured workers.Migration is not an easy outside option for the chronically poor youth due its financing costs, and when endured it is commonly in the form of short spells of seasonal labour migration that does not return the desired surpluses.

Some pathways towards beneficial inclusion reveal that some youth can still escape from poverty amidst these challenging contexts. Poverty escapes depend mostly on accumulating capital and skill earlier in youth, either via education, inheritance (capital or skill) or observation, or migration. Salaried employment for the lucky few can still act as a double-edge sword. For the few that are able to find an occupation escapes are visible, but it is rare to have a long-term contract. For those waiting for a salaried public sector job, a combination of career strategies is common (part-time in the private sector and ‘volunteer’ work in public structures while awaiting a job opening). A much more common route out of poverty involves setting up a business based on capital investment and on significant skills acquisition through school or vocational training or observation, and through the support of social networks. For most young men, this route out of poverty begins with acquiring capital for migration transport costs through family and own earnings, then using the earnings from migration to invest in a business on return back home. Female escapes from poverty occur more frequently either when women work within and challenge the social norms to emancipate their role and agency to work, or when young divorced women acquire some form of assets or capital.

There also exist new models of precarious forms of inclusion in labour and certain forms of selfemployment – based on the mortgaging of productive materials, such as goods given on credit –which, under unregulated or adverse conditions, can trap the majority in chronic poverty or which do not provide resilience to shocks/systemic trends driving re-impoverishment. Temporary escapes in Tahoua and Zinder become unstable or lead to impoverishment when young people face a combination of systemic trends (e.g. an unstable economic environment or policy changes such as a spike in the cost of education) alongside micro shocks (e.g. the loss of a breadwinner or a health shock). The sudden loss of salaried employment is found to be strongly impoverishing, but so too is protracted engagement in commission-based work or self-employment without ownership of productive assets (e.g. a sewing enterprise with no machine or a moto-taxi service with costly rented motorbikes). Migration can also become a factor in the failure of temporary escapes – the likelihood of failure is higher the lower the capital and skills the migrant possesses prior to starting his or her journey and the higher the level of indebtedness via informal loans to financing the costs of migration.

This section analyses the causes of escapes, descents and retention in chronic poverty, drawing on the themes identified above on youth inclusion in labour markets. We begin by