Dr Ross Wignall

Despite decades of focus on gender and skills training, the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) landscape in Sub-Saharan Africa remains deeply gendered and rooted in wider structures of patriarchal inequality and exploitation. Engaging with recent theoretical moves toward gender-transformative and gender-just TVET programming, this paper explores how a gradual revisioning of TVET can be mobilised to challenge broader gender inequality and discrimination in precarious settings. Bringing together insights from feminist scholarship and the UN’s decent work agenda, which seeks to align fair and secure working conditions with the aspirations of workers, we ask what a gender-transformative future for TVET might look like where labour rights, sustainable livelihoods and wellbeing are incorporated from the ground up. Drawing on findings from Cameroon and Sierra Leone, from the innovative ‘Gen-Up’ project which aims to investigate possible gender-responsive TVET programmes and policies in collaboration with the TVET provider, the Don Bosco network we ask what is both possible and permissible in the fractious economic climate, where the focus on basic survival and income generation inhibits a genuine challenge to
entrenched gender norms and stereotypes. For young women especially whose aspirations are multiply damaged by persistent discriminatory frameworks and who become further vulnerable at times of economic and social crisis, we ask whether current TVET programming is helping them escape the multiple forms of
marginalisation they face. Even in cases where women may be portrayed as successful entrepreneurs or achieving sustainable livelihoods, the evidence suggests these individualistic narratives are leaving many young women behind. In this context of instability, precarity and increasing global and local socio-economic and gender inequalities we argue that only holistic TVET programming based on social and moral values and empowerment and proposing diverse pathways to decent work, creating forms of solidarity, collaboration and a contextualised enabling environment can act as both a lever for gender transformation and also an engine for broader socio-economic change fitting the ‘Decent Work’ vision and a constantly changing world of work.

This article explores the paradoxical gendering of Charisma in the lives of congregation members at a Charismatic Pentecostal church, the Church of Christ the King (CCK), in Brighton and Hove, UK. Gender is discussed as a ‘Hot Potato’ at CCK, a point of divergence and negotiation, and I show how these dialogues are shaped by specific symbolic and embodied forms of gendered imagination and practice which often operate counter to gender norms outside the church. Looking at the intersection of youth and gender at the church, I show how counter-cultural opposition serves to underwrite a culture of service and submission which buttresses patriarchal authority and cements gendered hierarchies within the church. As I argue, the overlooking of the relationship between religious leadership and gender is being increasingly challenged by the younger generation bringing together self-making processes from both the sacred and secular realm.

Working with a cohort of boys aged 14–18 and classed as not in employment, education, or training (NEET) at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in the UK city of Brighton and Hove, this article follows their progress as they engage with instructors and other pupils at the YMCA, using qualitative modes of inquiry to explore their reactions, feelings, and attitudes. As I demonstrate, their aspirations and sense of emergent manhood is often predicated on new relationships generated in the YMCA spaces rooted in a culture of caring and responsible masculinity founded on implicit Christian values. Through interviews with young men and the people around them, I probe some of the tensions in this process, showing how persistent attachments to places and spaces beyond the YMCA can create feelings of ambivalence and, in some cases, a sense of alienation and marginality even as they begin to feel that they belong.

This paper extends research on geographies of ageing in relation to urban academic and policy debates. We illustrate how older people in urban African contexts deploy their agency through social and spatial (im)mobilities, intergenerational relations and (inter)dependencies. Through doing so, we reveal how urban contexts shape, and are shaped by, older people’s tactics for seizing opportunities and navigating the urban terrain. Our analysis demonstrates how a more substantive dialogue between insights on ageing in African contexts and urban ageing policy can create new forms of knowledge that are more equitable and just, both epistemologically and in their policy impacts.

This article examines the experiences of an often-neglected population group in geographical scholarship, namely, elderly people living in African cities. Using qualitative research conducted in the Ghanaian cities of Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi, we demonstrate how investigating older people’s mobilities, and examining how they influence social and economic processes, has important implications for how agency in urban contexts is conceptualized. We do so using a novel analytical framework that combines mobilities and social infrastructure approaches to generate empirical insights that are more attuned to the spontaneity, heterogeneity, and informality of African urbanism as encountered by older residents. Our findings extend scholarship on ageing and urban studies in two key ways. First, we reveal the dispositions, practices and strategies older residents deploy as part of their efforts to navigate the urban terrain. Through doing so we qualify popular narratives in geography, and allied disciplines, of older people as either care givers or care receivers. Second, we further scholarship in urban studies which, while more considerate of insights from the majority world, especially the experiences of children and youth, has overlooked how older people are shaping urban dynamics in Africa.