Schooling, Generation, and Transformations in Livelihoods: Youth in the Sand Economy of Northern Kenya

Abstract

In northern Kenya, sustainable pastoral livelihoods are under strain. While climate changes implicating more frequent and prolonged drought periods reduce pasture productivity, new political and economic interests in the region are generating a growing pressure on land. In Laikipia North subcounty, schooled young people increasingly turn to new livelihood activities, such as sand harvesting, to replace or complement pastoralism. This chapter explores how livelihood activities become controversial topics in schools and communities and discusses how generational relations are negotiated through learning and laboring. Through an analysis of the livelihood activities and narratives of young men involved in the sand economy, it is argued that school ideas and practices regarding labor and environment come to play a central part in generational negotiations and that these negotiations reflect young people’s attempts to carefully balance competing moral expectations and generational positions of autonomy and dependency. The chapter contributes to debates about young people’s learning and laboring in Africa by pointing to the ways in which embodied laboring practices and environmental learning processes, entangled in livelihood changes, are fundamentally tied to generational relations and interactions.