Transport and Employment in International Development

This document is a ‘think piece’ about transport and young people in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. People who take decisions about transport planning and investment tend not to be young. By virtue of their positions in society, transport planners can neither really understand nor act on the aspirations and compulsions of young people without careful research that engages sensitively with young people.

Young people are a significant demographic of future transport users. What they want for the future is what the future could become; or, if these ideas can be worked and reshaped then an alternative future could be brought into existence. Our approach to these questions is to understand the cultural frames in which young people think about themselves, each other and the future direction of travel of the world.
We use an ‘anthropological’ frame to understand these issues, taking seriously young people’s understandings of and engagement with their lives and the world. We briefly review key milestones in recent social science literature on the conditions of young people in these regions. This material shows how the period of ‘youth’ has been extended by the spread of tertiary education and mass unemployment, taking it far beyond the traditional rituals marking the distinction between childhood and young adulthood. The rituals marking this fundamental transition emphasised separation from the family and early ties of belonging and these ideas continue to be deeply significant in the decision-making and planning activities of young people in relation to transport and the future.

The main body of the document is based on pilot conversations with 16 young people about their experience and use of transport, their own aspirations for the future and about the possible future of transport. These conversations show that ideas and practices of mobility are key in the daily routines of young people. Young people make decisions and calculations based on ‘transport rationale’ all the time. We do not know from the sample the whole range of factors that influence day-to-day decision making.

In the longer-term, we can see that for young people ‘transport thinking’ relates to what kind of society people want to live in and who they will become as individuals. Mobility emerges as one of the key signifiers of independence and separation from the family, tradition and the passage to adulthood.

We divide this material into a matrix of four tensions: progress and waiting; autonomy and dependency; mobility and immobility and security and conflict. The material shows that young people’s decisions are not simply determined by ‘rational choice’ as understood in a ‘cost-benefit’ frame, although this is part of what they tell us. Instead, short-term decisions are influenced by factors such as safety and cost. In the longer term, however, factors such as aspiration and cultural ideas of what makes a good life and a whole person play much more strongly in determining how people behave both in the present and in anticipation of particular kinds of future.

Finally, the methodology of this document is experimental. The fragments of our conversations suggest that there is a great deal more to understand about the ways in which young people situate themselves in relation to transport futures. The values, rituals and speculative ideas glimpsed in this tiny sample of voices open up fundamental questions about the future of transport which cannot be separated from the worlds of education, employment, development, families and what it means in different parts of the world to live a good life.