Making a Living: Learning Trajectories Towards the Ability to earn a Livelihood

Abstract

Abstract

The educational landscape in rural West Africa is currently shaped by a unique historical process. As a result of the large globally influenced schooling campaigns supported by highly influential global actors (UN-Millennium Development Goal II, 2000–2015), which aimed to contribute to the global enrolment of all boys and especially girls, a whole generation of young adults is now growing up who have almost all at least briefly attended school. Many of them were educational pioneers in their families. Thus, a whole generation of youths who were deeply influenced by these campaigns and the related immense hopes and expectations is now becoming adult. However, only a small minority have finished secondary school. Within this unique historical context, our project asks about the roles multiple learning processes – within and outside of school – play in becoming an adult, making a living, and earning a livelihood in one francophone country, Benin. Understanding making a living as a relational and multifaceted process entangled with socio-economic conditions, as well as social embeddedness and hopes of upward mobility, we ask how the general and abstract promises and hopes of the schooling campaigns are related to actual biographical processes. Population growth, scarcity of land, the rising importance of formal exams and specific problems of the formal labour markets seem to be obstacles to finding one’s place in adult life.