Moving beyond employment and earnings: reframing how youth livelihoods and wellbeing are evaluated in East Africa

Studies of youth skills development programs are often limited to assessing changes to employability and earnings over a short period of time, and often are unable to explain why impacts occurred or never transpired. This article, drawing on a capability approach, aims to expand the outcomes assessed as well as the time over which impacts might occur in order to understand how such programs can foster livelihoods and multidimensional wellbeing. This paper illustrates how findings from a mixed-methods longitudinal study of a livelihoods program in Uganda and Tanzania can address limitations of short-term, quantitative studies. Quasi-experimental results demonstrated the program had an impact on knowledge and skills necessary to secure a livelihood, but this paper draws on qualitative data over five years to show how two specific knowledge and skills are enacted toward livelihoods, or not. The findings discussed include how knowledge of savings is not enacted, in many cases, in the anticipated savings behaviors to secure and sustain livelihoods, and how confidence in work skills take considerable time and other supports to be enacted in securing and sustaining work. The qualitative longitudinal data provide rich detail of the contextual factors that influence youth’s livelihoods and wellbeing over time.