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

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 First, we will use information from historical documents archived in South Africa (e.g. newspapers, colonial records), combined with rainfall data, to produce a time-line of drought severity for the study area back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.

The research design is focussed on impact, and the co-designed and co-produced nature of the research activities will ensure impacts will be generated within South Africa throughout the foundation phase of the project. Impact pathways are integrated within the project's five main research activities. These pathways will be further strengthened in the main phase of the project, aiming to have long term national and international impacts on resilience in drought affected communities. The involvement of community partners in South Africa in the co-design and co-production of the project will ensure it is co-owned, so that the impacts are valued by local communities, users and beneficiaries.

Our vision is that the project activities will develop a new interdisciplinary understanding of the effect of drought on young people that will have an impact on community resilience to drought in South Africa through three pathways:

1. Facilitating structurally disadvantaged young people to make resilient moves
2. Building capacity in community partners to promote resilience
3. Engaging the provincial and national disaster planning agencies in the long-term development of a youth resilience strategy.

During the foundation phase the main beneficiaries will be:

i. 50 young women and men recruited in Govan Mbeki, a drought challenged municipality in South Africa, to act as co-researchers. They will be integral to the project's research activities and will acquire research skills and knowledge designed to enhance their resilience and contribute to resilience in their local communities.

ii. Three young staff from Boingboing, a UK Community Interest Company that works with disadvantaged young people. They will work with the young co-researchers to develop arts-based outputs that will expand their own research and organisational skills that they can utilise in their work for Boingboing.

iii. Ten Masters students from University of Pretoria involved in working with the co-researchers on the arts based activities. This will contribute to their personal career development by strengthening their community engagement, research and dissemination skills.

iv. Khulisa Social Solutions, the project's core community partner, whose mission involves developing impactful interventions, building resilience to natural hazards and multi stakeholder engagement. Their role in co-designing and co-producing all the project activities and playing a leadership role in generating local impacts will ensure they enhance their multiple skills and experience for working with local communities, provincial and national government.

v. The business sector, provincial and national government organisations in South Africa, including the Govan Mbeki municipality, the national Water Research Council, the National Department of Rural Education and business sector groups with rural agriculture adaptive systems interest including Mertech and Russelstone. These organisations will be involved in designing and disseminating the youth resilience strategy, a key output of the foundation phase that will be further developed in the main phase of the project. This involvement will aim to enhance these organisations' understanding of community responses to drought and strategies for enhancing drought resilience.

The delivery of impact will be co-designed and regularly refined throughout the 9-month project period with milestones for impact assessment linked to each of the five project activities. Khulisa Social Solutions will play a leading role in the development of impact pathways to ensure they are valued in South Africa. The partners have long established websites, media tools and Twitter feeds with high followership (e.g. Boingboing and Resilience Research Centre, Dalhousie University). These will be used to direct internet traffic to the project website to ensure engagement of a wide range of users and beneficiaries during the foundation phase.