Youth, embedded in street life in African cities, experience multiple daily and longer-term stressors which impact their socio-economic circumstances and capacities to meet their basic needs. Urban contexts of high unemployment, inequality, and poverty result in homeless youth, often with incomplete schooling, unable to secure a decent living through hustling in the informal economy, access safe spaces to sleep, nutritious food, and subject to violence or arrest. Yet, street youth are resilient, employing creative tactics to overcome challenges and build strategies for life endurance. This paper draws on 18 focus groups with 199 young people living on the streets in three diverse African cities (Harare, Zimbabwe and Accra, Ghana and Bukavu, DRC) to explore the nuances of their resilience. When exposed to significant stress, street youth mobilise relational, institutional, and contextual resources to be resilient. The paper, therefore, conceptualises resilience as a lived process that goes beyond traditional understandings of personal resilience, over space and time. Street youth ‘lived resiliencies’ are grounded in the social and economic fabric of cities and are deployed to overcome multiple difficulties. The paper concludes by translating co-responsibility for street youth lived resiliencies towards policy and practice communities.
