Youth Resilience to Drought: Learning from a Group of South African Adolescents.

Linda Theron,Angie Hart,Motlalepule Ruth Mampane,Liesel Ebersöhn

doi:10.3390/ijerph17217896

Abstract

Exposure to drought is on the increase, also in sub-Saharan Africa. Even so, little attention has been paid to what supports youth resilience to the stressors associated with drought. In response, this article reports a secondary analysis of qualitative data generated in a phenomenological study with 25 South African adolescents (average age 15.6; majority Sepedi-speaking) from a drought-impacted and structurally disadvantaged community. The thematic findings show the importance of personal, relational, and structural resources that fit with youths’ sociocultural context. Essentially, proactive collaboration between adolescents and their social ecologies is necessary to co-advance socially just responses to the challenges associated with drought.

Highlights

Worldwide, young people’s health and wellbeing is threatened by continuing climate change and related phenomena, such as drought [1]
To compensate for the inadequate attention to the factors that support youth resilience to drought, this article draws on data from the Patterns of resilience among young people in a community affected by drought study
This article reports a secondary analysis of a subset of the qualitative data, namely the dataset generated in April 2017

Summary

Introduction

Young people’s health and wellbeing is threatened by continuing climate change and related phenomena, such as drought [1]. 13252 [2], is on the rise [3]. Drought, which has been termed ‘a slow-moving disaster’, p. It is associated with heightened youth risk for impaired hygiene, poor health, psychological distress, and disrupted schooling [4,5,6,7]. Multiple studies have detailed the drought-related health and wellbeing risks [2], few have investigated the factors that protect youth health and wellbeing in the face or aftermath of drought. Few have investigated what enables youth resilience to drought-related risks. Given predictions that exposure to drought is unlikely to subside any time soon [1,3] and concomitant admonitions that ‘building resilience to drought remains a critical concern’ [9], the inattention to drought-related youth resilience is problematic

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion