Patterns of resilience among young people in a community affected by drought: Historical and contextual perspectives

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Natural disasters, including those that arise from hazards such as drought, negatively impact upon the social, economic, and environmental systems that affect young people's mental health and wellbeing. The impacts of drought on young people are particularly severe in sub-Saharan Africa, where recurrent drought intersects with development challenges such as inequality, exclusion, poor education and a lack of employability skills. It is important therefore to understand what enables young people to withstand, adapt to, resist or challenge these impacts (i.e. to be resilient). Resilience is about beating and changing the odds. So, equally critical are how young people can be best supported to reflect on and communicate their resilient responses, and how adults (including local and national governments) can 'change the odds' that place young people at risk. To understand better the complex relationships between drought, social-ecological systems (e.g. family, school, government, the physical environment) and resilience, this proposal outlines an interdisciplinary study to explore the resilience of young people living in the drought-challenged Govan Mbeki municipality of Mpumalanga, South Africa. The study will adopt a social ecological approach, with a particular interest in how social and environmental systems enable and constrain the resilience of young people challenged by drought. The study will address a series of questions. How has drought severity in the Govan Mbeki municipality changed over time? What do youth living in the municipality identify as their own health and wellbeing priorities? How do these young people define resilience in times of drought? Which characteristics of young people, and their families, communities, culture and physical environments, make them more resilient to drought-related stress? Are there gender and other socio-demographic differences in the way youth experience and adapt to drought? How can young people be best supported to reflect upon and communicate their responses to drought? To answer these questions, we will use a blend of approaches from the sciences, arts and social sciences. First, we will use information from historical documents archived in South Africa (e.g. newspapers, colonial records), combined with rainfall data, to produce a time-line of drought severity for the study area back to the mid-19th century. Working with a community partner and local masters students, we will then encourage young people from Govan Mbeki to use arts-based activities to explore and communicate their personal, family, community, cultural, and environmental responses to times of drought. Armed with the timeline of drought severity, each young person will also be asked to talk to one adult to gather historical narratives of drought-related changes to their community and explore how the community coped with these changes. The academic team, students, youth and community organisations will use the data generated from these activities to co-produce a strategy to support the resilience of young people to drought-related challenges. This strategy will use drama to share knowledge and develop collective approaches to environmental challenges and opportunities. The youth researchers will be supported in identifying a creative medium of their choice through which to communicate their emergent resilience strategy to relevant stakeholders. This might involve an exhibition, site-specific film and/or live performance event. The youth researchers will take centre stage in the dissemination. Together, the data generated will form an instrumental case study of the resilience of young people from Govan Mbeki, as well as that of their physical and social ecology. We intend to use the approach and findings of this study as the basis for a future large-scale investigation that will assess the relevance of our results to young people in other drought-stricken communities in South and sub-Saharan Africa.