Young Adults Making a Living in Senegal: How Relations Open and Close Access to Economic Opportunities

As many other countries in Sub-saharan Africa, Senegal has witnessed rapid expansion of formal education with persistently high labor market informality and urbanization without industrialization, limiting formal employment to a privileged minority. Established life course oncepts, such as the "school-to-work transition" are unable to capture young adults' biographical experiences in such contexts. Instead, we propose the concept of "making a living" as a continuous process. We use data from 23 in-depth qualitative autobiographical interviews that were collected in three waves among young adults in Senegal between 2021 and 2024. We examine 1) the temporality of making a living in youth biographies, and 2) the ambivalent relational dimension of making a living, where social network can both grant access to economic opportunities or prevent youth from realizing future economic opportunities due to immediate obligations to extended family members. We address three questions: First, how do young adults make a living, that is, from which sources to they combine resources, and how did their livelihoods change across the three waves of data collection? Second, how do relations in social networks open opportunities for making a living? Third, how do expectations and obligations in extended families and local communities inhibit youth from realizing future opportunities for making a living? For instance, one of our interview partners, who is highly educated, single and childless at age 32, describes how his brother helped him to obtain a formal job after many frustrating years of unpaid internships and ad-hoc hustling opportunities. Once he obtained this job, he first took financial responsibility for his parents, which limited his possibilities for marriage and fatherhood. We compare biographical experiences of young men and women to show gender differences in the temporality and relational dimension of making a living for young adults in Senegal.