Retrenched to Oblivion? Examining the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy through the Spectrum of Youth Participation

Living in poverty as a young person may mean an inability to get an education, get a decent job, or secure ample shelter. It may also mean being more vulnerable to preventable diseases, crime and violence, inadequate access to justice, as well as exclusion from political and development processes in one’s community. For young people, poverty is deeply about equality, specifically in relation to opportunities and decision-making, or the lack thereof. There has for many years been general acceptance, in principle, that young people are entitled to the full realization of their social and economic rights – to education, to health care, to an adequate standard of living for proper development. Various international organizations (UN bodies, the African Union, and various international NGOs) now recognize that young people are subjects of rights, rather than mere recipients of adult protection, and that those rights demand that young people themselves are entitled to be heard and to meaningfully participate in development processes, including poverty reduction strategy (PRS) processes. In this research I investigate the extent to which the Malawi Government respected young people’s rights to participate in the development of the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS), which is the country’s version of the PRS. I also examine the reasons behind the (non)participation and the implications of this on the content of the MGDS with regard to issues that affect young people in Malawi. I use theories of power and agency; participation; rights based approaches; democratic discourses; and social construction of youth to explain my findings from the primary and secondary qualitative data collected for this purpose. In a nutshell, the findings point to the fact that young people are not a priority target group in the MGDS and there are structural and institutional explanations for this state of affairs. With a prevalent youth bulge in Malawi’s population, this could be a recipe for social unrest in the near future.