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Paper short abstract

The paper explores how marginalised young women in Uganda navigate social protection in crises. With a participatory approach, it reveals their agency despite structural constraints through network cultivation, and navigating power dynamics via tolerance, shapeshifting, resistance and avoidance.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how marginalised young women in Uganda navigate protracted crises while engaging with social protection mechanisms. Uganda faces multiple crises –unemployment, poverty, climate shocks, precarity, and normalised violence– with institutions unable to adequately meet social protection needs, particularly affecting young women facing intersecting inequalities.

While social navigation research explores agency-structure relationships, it often neglects gendered and intersectional nuances young women face when navigating access to social protection in unstable contexts. Further, traditional social protection approaches often position young women 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.

Our findings reveal that despite structural constraints, these women exercise agency navigating 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 choices about cultivating social networks, and navigating unequal power dynamics through obliged tolerance, shapeshifting, resistance and avoidance.

This paper contributes to debates on social protection and social navigation in crises, particularly in African contexts. Our approach foregrounds marginalised young women’s agency, challenges passive beneficiary narratives and offers insights to inform social protection approaches that are more responsive to young women’s social navigation.