Youth, Farming and Precarity in Rural Burundi

In the aftermath of civil war, young people in eastern Burundi experience their livelihoods and preparations for independent householding as ‘lacking’. Aware of the unsustainability of current practices of land inheritance and farming, they orient to other livelihood possibilities whilst maintaining an aspiration to a farming future. Combining ideas from agrarian studies and youth studies, we argue that a generational approach helps exposing structural problems of reproduction in rural communities. Young people’s responses to difficulties in social reproduction vary. Formal (secondary) education and gender in particular affect strategies of circular migration and marriage, and expose young people to hardship and violence in different ways.