Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how marginalised young women in Uganda navigate social protection in crises. With a participatory and feminist approach, it reveals their agency negotiating complex support mechanisms through network cultivation, shapeshifting, trade-offs, waithood, resistance and avoidance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how marginalised young women in Uganda navigate protracted crises and engage with various support mechanisms, including social protection. Uganda’s crises –marked by unemployment, poverty, recurrent climate shocks, precarity, and normalised violence– are compounded by institutions unable to meet social protection needs, particularly affecting trajectories of those facing intersecting inequalities, such as young women.

Social navigation scholarship highlights the interplay between agency and structure but often overlooks the gendered and intergenerational challenges these women face in accessing social protection. Moreover, top-down social protection tends to frame them as passive recipients of support, failing to acknowledge their agency.

The study used a qualitative, participatory approach with narrative and visual methods, working with local researchers and ten marginalised young women –aged up to 35, including single mothers and women with impairments– in Teso and Karamoja, as part of a broader project on social protection navigation.

Within their constrained opportunities, these women exercise agency as they navigate complex and interlinked structures. While these structures can provide or facilitate access to social protection, they also pose challenges and risks. The young women respond by making deliberate choices about building and navigating social networks; shapeshifting; tolerating and making trade-offs; waiting, negotiating and diversifying; and resisting or avoiding certain practices.

This paper contributes to debates on social protection, social navigation, crises, youth and gender, particularly in African contexts. A feminist perspective foregrounds the agency of marginalised young women, challenging passive beneficiary narratives and offering insights for social protection responsive to their social navigation.