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Record W4407232094 · doi:10.15173/glj.v15i3.5966

Kenya’s Protests Herald a New Age of Anti-Austerity Youth Politics

2024· article· en· W4407232094 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Monicah Gachuki

Bibliographic record

VenueGlobal Labour Journal · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicYouth Education and Societal Dynamics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAusterityPoliticsPolitical sciencePolitical economySociologyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Monicah h Gachuki, , Kenya a Medical l Practitioners, , Pharmacists s and d Dentists s Union n (KMPDU), , Kenya a On 18 June, a wave of youth-led protests began to roil Kenya.These protests quickly gained momentum, occurring every Tuesday and Thursday into July.The most significant of these demonstrations took place on 25 June, when protestors occupied parliament.Clashes with police resulted in several deaths.To understand the significance of these events, it is important to consider the broader sociopolitical context in Kenya.The protest movement was not an isolated development but rather reflected deep-seated frustrations among the Kenyan population, particularly the nation's youth.These frustrations stemmed from a range of issues including economic hardship, unemployment, corruption and a perceived disconnect between government priorities and the needs of the people.What made these protests particularly distinct was the composition and approach of the demonstrators.Unlike previous movements, these protests were driven primarily by Gen Z youth.These youths leveraged the use of social media such as X (formerly Twitter) for communication, mobilization and amplification of their demands, showcasing a new era of digital activism in Kenya.This generation of protesters was also notable for being "tribeless", a significant departure from Kenya's historical pattern of ethnic-based politics.This shift indicated a potential political transformation in the country, as the youth rallied around shared ideals rather than tribal affiliations.The protests began as a response to tax hikes, which were largely driven by the need to repay IMF loans.By mid-2020, amid the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic, Kenya's public debt had swelled to nearly 6.3 trillion shillings.This figure represented a daily borrowing rate of about 4.5 billion shillings during the pandemic's early months (Olingo, 2020).The trend continued, with total public debt rising by approximately 17 per cent over the following year, reaching 7.34 trillion shillings by March 2021 (KIPPRA, 2021).The global landscape shifted again in 2022 with the onset of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, further straining Kenya's economy.Under guidance from the IMF, the government shifted the financial burden onto citizens with measures such as doubling the fuel Value Added Tax in July 2023, which led to record-high fuel prices.Additional proposals targeted staple foods such as sugar and maize flour for new taxation, policies that had the most brutal impact on the country's most vulnerable (Kalevera, 2023).Earlier this year, under pressure to conform to IMF conditions, President William Ruto supported a controversial finance bill that included even greater tax hikes.The announcement came as many Kenyans, especially young people, were struggling to make ends meet, with inflation at an all-time high and the cost of living already skyrocketing.The unemployment rate, particularly among youth, had reached alarming levels, leaving many young people feeling neglected and

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.034
Threshold uncertainty score0.067

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0100.004
Scholarly communication0.0040.003
Open science0.0000.003
Research integrity0.0050.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0170.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.346
Teacher spread0.312 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations1
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractno

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