There is a great deal of ‘not’ in NEET: not in education, not in employment, not in training. I have been thinking about what these absences might mean. Do they draw attention to opportunities that young people are being denied? Do they help make exclusion visible to policymakers? Or do they encourage us to define young people by what is missing from their lives, hiding the relationships, responsibilities and contributions that are already there?
How far can a category built around absence take us towards understanding a person’s life?
This is a conceptual question for research like R-NEET. When we study multisystemic resilience to depression among young people who are NEET, we need a way to identify the population we are interested in. We also need to think carefully about what that way of identifying people allows us to see, and not see.
Afrikan philosophical debates about personhood offer a way to examine this gap. One possible starting point is the Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism (1997). Gyekye takes seriously the relationships through which people live and develop, while defending the significance of individuality, agency and rights. Community is fundamental, but it does not exhaust who a person is.
This is a particular philosophical position, developed in conversation with other Afrikan thinkers. It obviously should not be treated as a description of what everyone across Africa believes. Of course, no single philosophical position is going to address our needs universally, and one of the gifts of research is that enables us to explore ideas critically. For example, a young person experiencing depression may struggle to care for relatives or take part in communal activities. If fulfilling these responsibilities is treated as a measure of moral personhood, could their difficulty participating become grounds for judging their character, rather than recognising their need for support?
Read through this perspective, the argument making a clear link between ‘not in employment, education or training’ to ‘disengaged from society’ becomes very difficult to sustain. Someone can be excluded from a labour market while remaining deeply involved in other people’s lives. Their contribution may be poorly recognised precisely because it happens outside the activities through which we usually measure participation.
There is a question here about the explanations science makes possible. If we begin with an individual’s employment or education status, we might ask what helps that individual enter work or study. If we also begin with their relationships, we might ask how responsibilities are distributed, whose opportunities are constrained by caring for others, and what support would enable greater choice. Both sets of questions are important, but they focus our attention differently.
Communal responsibilities can also constrain. Caring for relatives may be meaningful and valued, while limiting someone’s opportunities to study, earn or rest. In our recent working paper, we argue that multisystemic resilience requires an equally multisystemic understanding of responsibility: obligations should be distributed according to actors’ power and capacity to act.
Applied here, this means asking whether young people are carrying responsibilities that institutions and services should be sharing. When a young person sacrifices education to meet a family’s care needs, encouraging their resilience can leave the inadequacy of public support unchallenged. Recognising their contribution therefore requires us to ask who carries the responsibility, whether they have meaningful choices, and who has the power to change those conditions. Relationships matter, but their existence alone does not tell us whether responsibilities within and around them are fairly distributed.
This is where I find the encounter between Afrikan philosophy and the NEET category most useful. It encourages scrutiny in both directions. The category needs to be questioned when a description of institutional participation becomes a judgement about a whole person. Communitarian thinking needs to be questioned when belonging appears conditional on meeting obligations.
For R-NEET, these are questions about how we frame our enquiry, before they are questions about what the data show. What forms of participation do our concepts recognise? What demands do young people face? And how much responsibility do we place on the institutions and communities around them?
NEET can help us count exclusion. Understanding resilience also requires us to ask what young people can expect from others, what they value, the relationships the sustain, the futures they want, and where responsibility for making those futures possible lies.
Gyekye, K. (1997). ‘Person and Community: In Defense of Moderate Communitarianism’. In Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195112252.003.0002
