In collaboration with colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK, this feasibility study was undertaken by a team of academic researchers from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, University of Ghana and Makerere University in Uganda, all of whom are members of the Africa Network of Care-leaving Researchers (ANCR).
Given the paucity of research on youth transitioning from alternative care (i.e. care-leaving or leaving care) in Africa, the study sought to develop and test a methodology for a cross-country, comparative study on leaving care in Africa. This involved the development of the methods used in the Growth Beyond the Town (GBT) longitudinal study on resilience and outcomes for care-leavers (Dickens, van Breda & Marx, 2015) to include further consideration of different groups of care-leavers across the domains of culture, gender and disability (Snow et al., 2017) and to incorporate a peer research model previously used in the You Only Leave Once (YOLO) study in Northern Ireland (Kelly et al., 2016). This amended methodology was then tested in four African countries (Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe) to examine its applicability in these differing political, economic and cultural contexts.
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