This article reports findings from the Pathways to Resilience study, South Africa. Rooted in a social ecological understanding of resilience, this mixed-methods study investigated resilience processes of black South African youths from poverty-stricken, rural contexts. School-attending youths (n ¼ 951) completed the Pathways to Resilience Youth Measure (PRYM), which included one resilience measure and two school experience measures. Independent sample t-tests showed that youth reporting agency-supportive school environments (n ¼ 137) had significantly higher resilience scores than youth with opposite experiences (n ¼ 330; t(465) ¼ À15.379, p ¼ 0.000). Likewise, youths reporting school staff respect (n ¼ 171) recorded significantly higher resilience scores than youth who experienced disrespect (n ¼ 277; t(446) ¼ À14.518, p ¼ 0.000). Subsequently, 130 resilient youths participated in focus groups and/or visual participatory activities to further explore their pathways to resilience. An inductive content analysis of these data illustrated that teacher-facilitated youth agency, aspirations for higher education and employment, and coping with neglect and cruelty, supported resilience processes. Overall, findings suggest that when schooling experiences are supportive of child rights, resilience processes are promoted. This conclusion urges school psychologists and school communities toward transactional practices that support positive youth development in child rights-centred ways.

Resilience, or adaptive behavior in the face of adversity, has recently come to be understood as a phenomenon that should not be uniformly conceptualized across contexts and cultures. This emerging understanding has urged exploration of what resilience might mean in specific cultural contexts. As in other majority nation contexts, there is scant documentation of what resilience might mean in an African context. In this article, the authors report on an exploratory qualitative study, rooted in a constructivist grounded theory approach, in which 11 South African adults from an impoverished rural area were invited to provide a description of resilient Basotho youth. In contrast to Eurocentric perspectives, their descriptions, verbal, written, and hand-drawn, offer an Africentric understanding of resilience. This emerging African conceptualization of resilience advocates for deeper exploration of collectivist philosophies underpinning Black youth resilience and continued research into the process of African resilience.

The phenomenon of resilience among street children as a group of at-risk youth goes unnoticed, since they are not typically regarded as resilient. Street children are mostly categorised as vulnerable youth who need care and support, and this deficit view ignores the assets and resources that enable them towards resilience. Nevertheless, street children are remarkably resilient. Using a qualitative approach (semi-structured and focus group interviews), we explore the hidden resilience of 20 street youths in the Free State and Gauteng. The findings transform the popular conceptualisation of street youth as vulnerable and, instead, paint a picture of young people who negotiate resilient trajectories, strengthened in part by personal resources (that are typically unconventional), bonds to their peer groups, and religiosity, to cope resiliency with the multiple challenges of streetism.

Globally, considerable numbers of at-risk children continue to disengage from school by dropping out and adopting street life for various reasons. These children survive in environments that are devoid of resilience-promoting resources. In South Africa, non-governmental organisations accommodate street children in shelters and send them to schools. This qualitative South African study examined whether or not school engagement strengthened resilience among male school-going street children in residential care. We conducted three semi-structured focus group interviews with the street children who volunteered participation in this study. The study involved 17 street children aged between 11 and 17 years. The participants had lived on the streets for periods ranging from three months to five years. The participants were in Grades 6–11. The transcribed interviews were thematically analysed. The findings showed that school engagement strengthened resilience among the participants by promoting pro-social change, future orientation, opportunities for support, learning of basic skills and restoration of childhood. The findings show researchers, health-care and educational practitioners that through school engagement, schools can expose street children to healthy and supportive social and academic environments in order to enable them to regain their childhoods, remain in school and function resiliently. The findings therefore, reconfirmed school engagement as a powerful, multifaceted resilience-promoting resource even for children with street life experiences.

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