First Generation Students Navigating Educational Aspirations in Zanzibar and Ghana

In Ghana and Zanzibar, Tanzania, first-generation students navigate uncertain and precarious conditions in the pursuit of becoming graduates and achieving their educational aspirations. This essay argues that youth in the Global South perform two entwined navigational capacities in this pursuit. First, the capacity for action, or collective agency, harnessed through relations with people in youths’ families, schools, and communities. Second, the capacity to hustle, which is a strategy of mobilizing social connections, life experiences, and tenacity to persevere through struggles and uncertainties. Narratives from fifty-eight first-generation secondary school and university students in Ghana and Zanzibar inductively reveal hustling as a strategy for engaging collective agency in the process of navigating structural barriers. The authors draw on youth-centered methodologies—popular theater and life history approaches—to show the complexity of youths’ experiences in negotiating the challenges and uncertainties in their lives while pursuing an education.