Overcoming interruptions in educational trajectories: Youth in Ghana with international migrant parents

Abstract

Literature on the effects of parental migration on the education of children who stay at origin, what we call ‘stayer’ youth, mainly focuses on educational outcomes without looking at the process leading to such outcomes. This article addresses this gap by showing how the educational trajectories of stayer youth unfold. Stayer youth may encounter a range of obstacles and interruptions to their education when their parents move overseas, and we explore the agency these youth exert and the support networks they activate to try to overcome them. We employ a youth-centric methodology, based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in three cities in Ghana, with young people whose parents migrated internationally. We find that frequent changes in residence, limited financial means, and lack of academic support cause interruptions in educational trajectories. In response, the young people mobilize support from local social networks to compensate for what they lack from their transnational connections.