‘I rose up’: marginalised young women’s navigation of social protection in Uganda’s protracted crises

This paper explores how marginalised young women in Uganda navigate access to social protection, addressing a gap in understanding how marginalised people experience social protection in protracted crises contexts and informing more responsive system design. Uganda’s multiple challenges – unemployment, poverty, weak governance, post-conflict legacies and normalised violence – undermine social protection provision and access, disproportionately affecting young women facing intersecting inequalities. While social navigation research explores agency-structure relations, it overlooks gendered and intersectional dynamics in crises. Similarly, traditional social protection approaches often position young women as passive recipients, disregarding their agency. Drawing on qualitative, participatory research with local researchers and ten marginalised young women in Teso and Karamoja as part of a larger project, we found that, despite structural constraints, young women exercise agency navigating complex structures that both facilitate and hinder social protection access. They cultivate social networks, and negotiate power imbalances through obliged tolerance, shapeshifting, resistance and avoidance. This research foregrounds young women’s agency, challenges assumptions of passivity, and contributes to debates on social protection and social navigation in crises, particularly in African contexts.