Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the concept of ‘pressure’ as a means of understanding the gendered livelihood strategies of young rural migrants in a post-pandemic Addis Ababa. It also draws attention to the social and economic consequences of navigating 'pressure', examined through a gender-sensitive lens.

Paper long abstract:

This paper operationalises the concept of ‘pressure’ to deepen our understanding of the social and economic embeddedness of the everyday practices of rural youth in Addis Ababa, examined through a gender-focused deconstruction of survival strategies and stress factors. Drawing on qualitative data collected in 2022, this paper finds youth ‘survive’ the city by devising strategies to deal with multifaceted gendered forms of pressure that characterise their lives as informal citizens in the Ethiopian capital. These expressions of pressure include meeting childcare responsibilities, addressing financial obligations to families of origin, living without access to state-provided services, and confronting rising costs of food and rent within contexts of social precarity and economic uncertainty. These strategies, structured around the diversification of income-generating activities and through activities linked to the realisations of future aspirations, form an integral part of migrants’ everyday lives. Nevertheless, this paper also finds that strategies devised to survive the city produce compounding layers of pressure, including the acquisition of debt, patterns of pathological substance abuse and gambling, and the seemingly unavoidable pursuit of future migration as a means of transforming lives for the better, pointing to the particularities of these gendered experiences, practices and future imaginaries as well as to the negative outcomes they create in the lives of migrant youth. This paper highlights the need to challenge normative theorisations of the disenfranchisement in the urban, using ‘pressure’ as a conceptual lens to underline the intricacies of everyday life in the new, post-pandemic African city.