The Survival Strategies of Poor Youth in the Metropolitan City of Douala, Cameroon

The question we asked in this work was how young people who are predominantly poor survive in the metropolitan city of Douala, considering their reduced purchasing power. Our main objective was to identify the various coping mechanisms that the poor in the metropolitan city of Douala use to survive. We use the explanatory sequential mixed method to carry out this research: in the first phase, we randomly administered 610 questionnaires constructed using the desired values for living a comfortable life in Douala, and in the second phase, we purposefully selected and interviewed 50 poor youth to understand their survival strategies. We discovered that about 91% of youths are poor and 68.7% of them are the working poor. We discovered that they succeed by being calculative, flexible, and creative, accepting precarious jobs, practicing "long-linked borrowing" and modelling. In the course of struggling for survival, they form various identities of themselves: those of strugglers, helplessness, uncertainty, underachievers, alienated people, etc. We noticed that poverty is situational and not cultural, because they also wish to integrate the main stream values of their society but they are constrained.