Adaptations of young people in monetary-poor households for surviving and recovering from COVID-19 and associated lockdowns

While young people globally have been less impacted by COVID-19 health outcomes than have older age groups, they have been disproportionately affected with disruptions to both their education (access to school and 'online learning') and home/personal life (e.g. access to food, ability to play and have leisure, and overall living arrangements). Those disruptions, particularly in monetary-poor households, are linked to major failures on the part of the national governments to design COVID-19 prevention and containment policies that mitigated the harmful cost of these policies (Gourinchas, 2020). Given this, the psychosocial consequences of COVID-19 are likely to be more severe for this age group (Power et al., 2020). There is therefore a crucial need to understand how young people have adapted during the pandemic and to assess the wider impact of such processes of adaptations. To do so, we adopt a nexus approach, focusing on food, education, and play/leisure embedded within a wider understanding of the living settings (local places) and home/personal contexts (household composition and home/personal life).

This project seeks to use an action research methodology to co-create this knowledge about such adaptations and generate wider recommendations, with young people, and the communities in which they live, and non-government bodies and non-profit organisations that focus on this age group. By co-creating knowledge, we aim to align our data collection efforts with these organisations' immediate knowledge needs to support the adaptations employed by young people to help them cope and recover from COVID-19 and associated policy responses. Our approach also allows to create a bridge between those affected by policy (young people) and those drafting and implementing policy (organisations). To do so, we focus on case studies in three locations: Mangaung and Moqhaka in Central South Africa, West Midlands in the UK, and São Paulo state in Brazil.